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    Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money: A 4-Week Guide to Building Wealth Together
    Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money: A 4-Week Guide to Building Wealth Together
    Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money: A 4-Week Guide to Building Wealth Together
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money: A 4-Week Guide to Building Wealth Together

    By Elle Martinez

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    About this ebook

    In her debut book "Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money," personal finance expert Elle Martinez shares her four-week plan to help couples stop worrying about money and start building wealth together. Written in Elle's warm, humorous, and easy-to-understand voice, this book helps couples build open and honest communication and get started on the path to financial freedom. By combining personal stories as well as lessons learned from interviewing hundreds of successful couples, Elle shows just how "personal" finance can be, and teaches you how to live a simpler, more stress-free life.

    Inside this book, you will learn to:
    - Create a budget you both will love (Yes, it's possible!)
    - Build communication through money dates
    - Set goals as a couple and start planning your future
    - Effectively pay off debt and earn additional income
    - Automate your accounts so your money works for you!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoventry House Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2017
    Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money: A 4-Week Guide to Building Wealth Together
    Author

    Elle Martinez

    Elle Martinez is the creator and award-winning blogger behind Couple Money, a site and podcast dedicated to helping spouses build their marriage and wealth together. Each week she interviews financial experts and real-life couples who've achieved impressive financial goals like becoming debt free, starting a business, and retiring early. Through her podcast, she finds patterns and habits that help couples become successful. In addition to Couple Money, Elle has been a contributing writer to such major media platforms as Business Insider, TurboTax, Entrepreneur, Lending Tree, and many more. Connect with Elle on Twitter @couplemoney, and visit her website couplemoney.com for the latest tips on money and marriage.

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      Book preview

      Jumpstart Your Marriage & Your Money - Elle Martinez

      Contents

      Introduction

      Week 1: Creating Your Roadmap

      1 - Creating Your Dream Together

      2 - Taking Your Financial Snapshot

      Week 2: Creating Your Spending Plan

      3 - Building a Budget You Both Will Love

      4 - Making Your Money Work for You

      Week 3: Boosting Your Bottom Line

      5 - Save Money & Jumpstart Your Finances

      6 - Side Hustle Nation

      7 - Effective & Efficient Investing

      8 - Protecting Your Family With Insurance

      9 - How to Effectively Pay off Debt

      Week 4: Choose Your Own Adventure

      10 - How to Travel for Less

      11 - Money Moves for Starting a Family

      12 - Financially Preparing for Homeownership

      13 - How to Retire Early

      Appendix

      About the Author

      Introduction

      Let me be upfront, money is not the most important thing in life, but it can be a huge source of frustration, stress, and tension in a marriage. In fact, a survey by SunTrust Bank found that 35 percent of married couples cite money as the leading issue they fight about. But as someone who interviews married couples about their finances, I have yet to meet a couple who wanted to intentionally sabotage their marriage.

      Time and again, I have found that marriages are nearly destroyed by not talking about money (because spouses want to avoid a fight), not having a financial plan, and not having a clear idea of how they’re spending money as a couple.

      The good news is that money doesn't have to be a weight on your marriage any longer. Instead, you can learn how to use it to build a life that you will love. The sooner that you can get comfortable managing and discussing your finances as a couple, the less stress and more fun you'll have together.

      Whether you're newlyweds or have been married for years, I'll take you through a process that will jumpstart your marriage and money in just four weeks. By the end, you’ll have all the tools you need to manage your money and take charge of your financial life.

      Why Me?

      I'm Elle Martinez, creator of Couple Money, a personal finance site and podcast dedicated to helping spouses work together to build wealth.

      I started my site several years ago because, at the time, I couldn't find a resource that addressed the unique and sometimes difficult conversations that come up when discussing money and marriage. The topics I was interested in were:

      • How to combine finances after saying I do.

      • How to create a joint budget.

      • How to deal with (and dump) debt as a couple.

      • How to approach lending money to family members.

      After I got engaged, my fiancé and I decided to do the responsible thing and have the money talk. We knew how disagreements over money could potentially ruin a marriage, so we were going to rip off the Band-Aid and put all the numbers out there in the open.

      Are you cringing? Yeah, you should be, because it didn't go the way either of us expected. It turns out that he had one semester's worth of student loans and I had the trifecta of debt—credit cards, student loans, and a car loan. I couldn't even give him an exact number of how much money I actually owed!

      Although it was a bit of a mess at first, we did manage to turn things around considerably. We paid off $35,000 of debt, we learned how to make saving money a routine habit, and we simplified our finances and our lives so that we have more time for the people and projects that we love.

      As I began sharing our story on my site, readers chimed in with their unique experiences and a community was born. (Visit www.CoupleMoney.com for bonus material and supplemental information to accompany this book.) Soon after, I launched The Couple Money Podcast as a way to track the patterns displayed by successful couples who have done extraordinary things like pay off massive amounts of debt, start their own business, travel the world, and even retire early.

      Understanding How Personal Finance Can Be

      Being wealthy means something different to every couple. I believe a rich life is separate from how much money is in your bank account. Taking care of your finances, however, is an important element of marriage because it puts you in a position to give your time and money to the people and projects that matter most to you.

      Remember, this is your marriage and your money.

      While you need to stay on top of your money, you don't need to obsess over every penny. I’ll help you strike a healthy balance by sharing tools and apps that will help alleviate the tedious parts of the process so you can focus on what really matters.

      How This Book Is Designed

      I love to read, but I hate personal finance books that only go over theory and provide no value in the real world. That's why I wrote this book with practical applications in mind that are designed to ensure your hard-earned money is going towards the goals that matter most to you.

      I’ve also included a number of talking points, checklists, and activities to help you get more comfortable with money. Think of this book as a travel guide. There's going to be plenty of information about the destination you're going to visit, the foods you should try, and the sights you should see, but for it to be truly useful, you're going to have to actually go there and experience it for yourself.

      Jumpstart Your Finances in Four Weeks

      This book is designed to help you jumpstart your money and marriage over the course of a month. In the first week, we will look at what it is that you want to achieve with your money, and I’ll help you get a clear idea of what your finances look like now. In the second week, we’ll create a plan that allows you to quickly and easily manage your money and stay on top of your finances. In the third week, I'll show you how to generate additional income and save more money so you can achieve your goals faster. Finally, in the fourth week, I'll help you put together everything that you learned so you can finally achieve your goals and live a simpler, more stress-free life.

      I want you to know upfront that it's okay to make mistakes. Just as your marriage will strengthen over the years as your lives merge together, your finances will improve, too. So don't worry about getting everything exactly right the first time you try. Having been there, I know that sometimes things can get heated, arguments ensue, and the best laid plans can fail. I’ll help you make adjustments and diffuse tense situations as they arise. My goal is to teach you how to encourage each other so that you can have fun while building your wealth and your marriage.

      Week 1

      Creating Your Roadmap

      1

      Creating Your Dream Together

      We often spend more time planning our vacations than we do our finances. Think about all of the effort that you put into planning a fantastic getaway. You research your travel destination and make a list of the must-see spots and activities. You hunt for travel deals, make reservations, and perhaps buy travel insurance. Before you’ve even arrived, you’ve already started day-dreaming and have a clear picture of what your vacation will look like.

      When it comes to defining your personal finance goals, however, it’s unlikely that you’ve planned for them in as vivid detail. But the good news is that mastering your money can be as easy as planning a trip together. The first step? Defining where you want to go and why.

      What Are You Trying to Achieve?

      Before going on a trip, you need to know two critical pieces of information: Your starting point and your final destination.

      The same is true when it comes to planning your financial goals, but for some reason we seem to have difficulty defining these two elements. And when it comes to defining your goals as a couple, it becomes even more difficult. Let’s take the goal of retirement for example.

      You may both want to retire early, but the idea of retirement may be completely different for each of you. One of you might picture being in your forever home (a cabin in the woods where you write your beloved novel) while the other is looking forward to backpacking around the world and living a more active lifestyle.

      And that's normal.

      Yes, the two of you have taken a vow and you're a team, but you're still you. Your personality, quirks, and dreams are yours. The exciting part is seeing how you can combine these traits with your spouse’s and create a life together.

      The first step to defining your retirement goal is discussing your what and your why. It’s important for each of you to say out loud what it is that you want to do with your money and your time during retirement. Remember, it's like planning a trip. You may have different destinations in mind at the start, but knowing what each of you wants will allow you to work together to see if a third location will

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