What is the main topic of the interview? [br] [originaltext]Interviewer(M)Jean

Interviewer(M)Jean Chatzky(W)
M: You’ve spent your life building your nest egg, and protecting your assets and then it happens. You fall in love. But is marriage a good financial move for you?(1)On today’s money, marriage and your finances, Money in Today’s Financial’s editor Jean Chatzky will give us some advice. Jean, hey!
W: Hey!
M: So marriage is a beautiful thing. But look at it from sort of like a cold hard financial perspective: is it a smart thing to get married?
W: It rolls a lot of people’s assets into a risky position. Because think about it this way, we are getting married later, which means we are coming at marriage by the time that we have houses, retirement accounts, we may have kids from a previous marriage, we wanna take care of all of those things, and just tying the knot can actually put those assets in a precarious position.
M: And having that money talk when you are in love is so hard, isn’t it?
W: It’s hard when you are not in love. I mean, I only say I do what I do for a very specific reason, talking about money used to and still does at some point make me completely nuts and(2)if you don’t have these conversations, then you are going to really do yourself serious financial damage.
M: Although it is a tough job to talk about money, you gotta have the talk, right?
W: Yeah, that’s true!
M: Okay! First, let’s talk about income. Now here is a question for you. Can getting married lower your income?
W: It absolutely can. Because if, let’s say, you are toward retirement age, and you are earning more money in retirement as a single than getting married. And it can actually lower the amount of money that you have to draw on from alimony.
M: Now, I always thought according to taxes, like everyone say, oh, getting married is so good for your taxes, you always end up saving money on taxes, is it true or not?
W: Not necessarily. If you fde jointly, that’s probably the best way to go, but there is the thing called marriage penalty and it doesn’t go away when you get older. You can actually lose money to taxes. If you get married, your spouse is going to inherit all of your assets without paying any taxes on them. But it may mean that your kids do not.
M: That’s scream’s prenup right. I mean, you should just get a prenup, which means you have to fix out an agreement before marriage.
W:(3)Well, a lot of people really do need to look at the prenup question. The older you are, the more you come to the party with, particularly if you come to the party with either kids from a previous marriage or a business, you gotta protect that, and that means getting a lawyer in your court and a lawyer in his and sitting down at the table.
M: Well, let’s talk about kids. If you have grown kids, how does getting married later in life affect them?
W:(4)You have to look at the question of inheritances. If your new spouse is gonna all of a sudden inherit everything that you have, your kids are all of a sudden not going to unless you take care of that in your wills and with the prenup.
M: OK. Let’s talk about the pros of getting married, financially what are, what’s the good side of that?
W: There are some good things in terms of real estate. If you own a house and your spouse owns a house, when you get married you are allowed to take a 500,000-dollar capital gain rather than a 250,000-dollar capital gain as you could as a single person. You may have to live in that house for a couple of years before you sell it and rent the other one, but that can be a huge amount of money to stock in the bank.
M: It sounds reasonable to have a certain marriage.
W: Yeah, that’s right!(5)Also you are gonna save money on auto insurance premiums, homeowner insurance premiums. So there are some good things and two can definitely live more cheaply than two apart.
M: And again, you know it’s just important to have the money discussion no matter how painful it is, right?
W: Absolutely. And if you can’t do it yourself, sit down with an advisor and do it together, but do it.
M: OK, Jean, thank you so much for the great advice. It should be very helpful for the audience.
W: My pleasure to share my ideas with you!