Jason and I have always been really open about our separate and combined financial situations. When we first decided that marriage was in our future we discussed our past money mess-ups and how we stood at the time – full disclosure. Ever since then we have had regular talks about how we feel about money, what we want to do with what we have, and what our end-goal is. Oddly enough, we’ve never fought about money, I think it’s because we never hid anything from each other and made every financial decision together, even the little stuff. When we were making the decision to move from California to Alabama this past summer, we took a good long painful look at our financial situation. We looked at our then-current budget and we made a realistic budget for after the move. We took into consideration the extreme changes in income and did some severe cut-backs in our budget (i.e. swapping the $400/month cell phone plan for a single emergency cell, eating out whenever we wanted to once-a-month or less date nights, etc.) We also estimated future budgets by considering when Jason would be getting expected raises and when certain expenses would...
