Manisha Thakor - Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money with Your Honey

Get Financially Naked will empower you to live the life that makes your heart sing on your own and in the context of your romantic relationship. How on earth, you may ask, can a book about money do all that?

First, this book will help you and your partner get on the same financial page, which means your relationship is much less likely to get torpedoed by financial stress. Second, by learning to talk about money with your honey in a constructive way, the odds are high that you will dramatically strengthen your relationship. Time and again, we've seen how getting intimate with this traditionally taboo subject is one of the best investments you can make in your relationship. This book will not only help you decide who will handle which financial responsibilities, but it will also help you dramatically increase your odds of achieving household financial harmony.

When we say Get Financially Naked, we mean learning to discuss the subject of money with your partner in a constructive way and learning to make smart decisions together about how to handle your personal finances. This book provides you the roadmap, language, and tactical tools to talk successfully about money with your honey.

We fully recognize that most people don't like to deal with their personal finances. So here's the good news: money is merely an enabler. The result, the real gift of Getting Financially Naked, is the ability to have a life that makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning and twirl around in joy. That's how this book about money can help you achieve your dream life.

Interestingly, we didn't plan to write this book. Rather, it jumped out at us and asked to be brought into existence. As we traveled across the country to promote our first book, a personal finance primer titled On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl's Guide to Personal Finance, we were surprised to find that the chapter to which women were most drawn was one we almost didn't include a short discussion about love and money. In our typical speech on Personal Finance 101, we'd point out that if you are willing to disrobe one way in a committed relationship, you should be willing to disrobe financially as well. This statement would typically evoke nervous laughter from the crowd and more than a handful of flushed faces. So we'd always go on to clarify that we're NOT talking about doing this on the first date. We'd emphasize:

Getting Financially Naked is something you do when you are in a serious, committed relationship.

We'd explain that this process entails discussing money with your mate. Specifically, it involves discussing what you own, what you owe, your income, and what your credit scores are before moving in together or getting married. Getting Financially Naked is not limited to what you earn, spend, and save. It's also about understanding your respective hopes and fears regarding money a process that goes way beyond raw numbers. Most importantly, financially baring it all is not a onetime activity. It involves regular check-ins as a couple to make sure you are meeting your savings goals, investing wisely, that you both know where your important papers are stored, and seeing if any of your life priorities have changed. As we'd say all this in our presentations, heads would inevitably start to bob gently up and down in agreement. And once our speech would end, it would start.

Woman after woman would come up to tell us how she wished she'd heard our speech or read On My Own Two Feet earlier. We'd hear stories about women in relationships where they, their mate, or both of them, mismanaged money, or they simply didn't agree about how to manage money. Even worse, we'd hear stories from women who thought everything was fine when it came to each of their family's money situation, but the reality was far from it. These women had all been short-changed when it came to their money and their relationships. It's no wonder. When you meet that someone special, what do your friends ask you? They ask if you are emotionally, physically, and spiritually compatible. However, consider this:

When was the last time someone asked if you were financially compatible with your mate?

Probably never. Study after study shows that money is one of the top causes of arguments in marriages, top reasons for divorce, and top drivers of general life stress. If you are thinking this couldn't happen to you or someone you know and love, think again. The women we met are representative of every woman. She is everyone from a woman with a graduate degree in business working in high finance to a newly minted high school graduate who has never had her own credit card. What we've discovered on the road is that getting the short end of the stick in a relationship, financially speaking, has absolutely no connection to your educational, economic, social, or ethnic background. We've seen it happen to every type of woman imaginable.

Now, we're not suggesting that women should be distrustful of their mates or adopt a victim mentality. If we had focused our financial literacy efforts on men, we have no doubt we'd hear comparable stories from their side. Our point is simply that across America, we are hearing stories of financial distress and many of these situations could have been prevented by frank and honest dialogue about money.