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Hello, I'm Elle and welcome to Couple Money!
What's Couple Money About?
As the name suggests, Couple Money is about working together as a couple on building your family's finances. We've all seen the news pieces about how money is big source of martial stress.
Couple Money is about using finances as a way to draw closer to one another to achieve your dreams.
How?
Money can be used as a tool to build your net worth by getting out of debt, creating some savings for emergencies and freedom funds, investing in your future (including retirement).
You + Me + $$$ = ?
There are a ton of personal finance blogs out that cover general finance tips.
My focus with Couple Money is to cover the financial process as well as the communication and teamwork needed to suceed.
I'll share tips, tools, and services that can help you two work out solutions that address your specific needs.
We'll tackle some common money situations that most couples have to deal with.
- Banking– Keeping our money working for us is important. We found that out when our first bank wasn’t giving us the customer service we wanted and the interest rate was depressing so we dumped them and found one that works for us.
- Budgeting – Creating a financial system that fits our family’s needs is a priority. We love what we do so we don’t want to spend a ton of our time tracking every penny, so automation plays a big role.
- Charity – We want to set aside a portion of our money to worthy causes. We don’t have a formal system so we’ll be working on creating a giving system that is sustainable.
- Credit Cards – For many people, it’s a love/hate relationship between them and their credit cards. For us we use credit cards as we need them – for rewards or 0% loans. Paying off credit card debt has made me wary of signing up for a ton of cards.
- Entrepreneurship – We’d like to become more entrepreneurial with our work and build more income.
- Investing– Right now our investing focus is for retirement. I'll show how you two can start investing with $100.
- Savings – Having some money set aside for emergencies is just one of our savings goals. We also have some short term goals like a vacation fund as well as buying a house someday.
I know we're not the only couple dealing with this so it's my hope that these are topics get a conversation going.
About Us
Now that you have an idea about what the site is about, I'd like to share a bit about us.
Rob and I have been married for over 16 years. Before we got married I had racked up credit card debt and made it my goal to get it paid off before our wedding.
Afterwards my husband and I decided to pay off the car loan off early and then knocked out our student loans.
Now the only debt we have is our mortgage., which we hope to have paid off in a bout two years or so.
I've been blogging about personal finance for a few years now as I started getting my finances squared away while in college.
After a few years I realized that I needed to start another site so I can focus on couples and money (hence the name).
As you've probably guessed, neither one of us is a certified financial expert.
We're just a regular couple who are building their net worth together.
If you're looking for professional help with your finances, try using The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA) to find a fee based financial planner. They should be able to work with you and your individual financial situation.
We'll share our progress (and setbacks – it's real life) on our journey. Thanks for joining us!
Photo by Uriel Mont
This was originally published in September 2009. It has been updated in 2023.