A Financial Clean Slate

I am very lucky in that my wife and I see eye to eye on more than 95% of personal finance issues. Especially considering that study after study concludes that fights over finances is the top reason couples divorce.

We wanted to start our marriage with a clean slate, money included. There was debt here and there ($60K+ total, give or take a dollar). There were non-retirement investments. There was a money market account. There was a wedding to pay for. Perhaps dangerously, a few weeks after our wedding we orchestrated a reverse-big-bang moment of our finances. We threw all the positives at the negatives and when the dust settled, we had $4000 cash and two paid-for cars.

Two weeks later, we had a little over $1000 and two paid-for cars. One of which had a shiny new transmission!

As I look back, I maybe would be inclined to do it a little differently. Maybe keep some of the debt around for a little longer for the sake of hanging on to some extra cash in case, say, a car transmission went out.

But, then again, what's wrong with taking the gamble we did? Why not have financially lean times right out of the gate, when there is unlimited marital bliss to keep us afloat?

As a young couple, it's tempting to want to imitate our parents' lives. They have the house, the nice furniture, nice cars, nice stuff. So, we could have gone the opposite way than we did. Instead of eliminating the debt, we could have added to it in the form of a mortgage and some new car payments.

But in fact, our route still allowed us to imitate our parents, just at a different time in their lives. When they were newlyweds. Except my parents had much less than we did.

Yes, at the beginning we were a little scared, but our hope is that we now have a solid foundation on which to build our lives. I am sure we haven't seen the last of tough times, but our peace of mind stems from the fact that we took care of the things we had control of before they took control of us.