How Do the Dolans Manage Their Finances?

Just a few days before our wedding, Ken confessed he had a credit card debt of $3,000. That was in 1970, when a new Volvo cost $3,300. I (Daria here) was working as a flight attendant and, like most young single women in those days, had no credit cards of my own. I was horrified at the idea of beginning a life together in hock. So I asked my father to co-sign a loan so that we could pay the credit cards off quickly. But then we had to pay off that loan, so I figured we would have to go on a rigorous spending diet.

Ken has always hated diets, but counting financial calories turned out to be good for us, as it will for anyone. We cut up Ken's credit cards, every single one of them. We didn't buy anything we couldn't pay off within 30 days. (That's a good policy for everyone...and one that we still follow!)

When we had our first apartment, one of our first cash transactions was buying two five-dollar pillows. For awhile we ate dinner sitting cross-legged on those pillows. We bought furniture as we could afford it, and in the meantime we had a lot of empty spaces in our apartment. And we were blissfully free of the burden of debt. That was our own little piece of nirvana.

Daria Pays Our Bills, Even Now. But We're Not Saying You Should Try This at Home...

I pay the bills because I am the more organized one in this couple when it comes to gathering up the bills and paying them in a timely fashion. But if Ken had never been a stockbroker, had never hosted a personal finance talk show...if Ken had been staying home writing poetry all these years while I earned a living helping people with their finances, you can bet I would sit him down and say, "Look, here are our monthly bills. Here is what we spend each month. Here is our investment statement." In other words, I'd make sure he was money literate.

We are both money involved. So it's okay that I happen to be the party who writes the checks, because Ken knows just where we stand.

But for people not in the money business, I believe it's imperative that they sit together when the bills need to be paid and discuss how they're going to invest. These responsibilities have to be interchangeable in case one partner is not around.