Is marriage a good financial move?

TODAY Financial editor Jean Chatzky takes a look at whether a walk down the aisle will cost you.

And this morning, on today’s Money marriage and your finances, 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? Here with some advice is Money in Today’s Financial editor Jean Chatzky. Jean, hey!
Hey!
So marriage is a beautiful thing.[It can be.] But look at it from sort of like a cold hard financial perspective, is it a smart thing just kind of a broad question to get married?
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, we have, think, 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.

And having that money talk when you are in love is so hard, isn't it?
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 if you don’t have these conversations, then you are going to really do yourself serious financial damage.

So painful it is, you gotta have the talk.
You gotta get to the line and have a talk?
Okay! First, let’s talk about income.Now here is a question for you. Can getting married lower your income?
It absolutely can. Because if let’s say you are toward retirement age, and you are earning money in retirement, your social security benefits will get taxed you can earn up to 25,000 dollars a year as a single person, but you get married you can only earn up to 32,000 before you get taxed. And it can actually lower the amount of money that you have to draw on from alimony.(Oh, yes) and, you know, if you get alimony, if you are getting social security benefits, or pension benefits from a previous spouse. Those could completely go away. You have to sort of compare what you could be eligible from, from your new spouse.

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 true?

Not necessarily. If you file 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 and again you have to look at your (personal) individual situation. If you get married, your spouse is going to inherit all of your assets without paying any taxes on them once you get married. But that may mean that your kids do not.

That's scream's prenup right, I mean, you should just get a prenup.

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.

Well, Let’s talk about kids. How, let’s say you have kids in college, pretend, or you have a grown kid, how does getting married later in life affect them?

If you have kids who are about to go to the college, your new spouse’s income can be taken into consideration to form those financial aid formulae. So you might marry somebody who's earning a boatload of money, all of a sudden this child who you thought would be eligible for financial aid may not be. And that may make it difficult to [you know] pay for school, depending on how you've set up the finances. You also have to look at the question of inheritances. If your new spouse is ganna 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.

OK. Let’s talk about the pros of getting married, financially what are, what's the good side of that?

Besides the love,(no no no) the love is very, you know, I like the love. But there are some good things in terms of real estate. If you own a house and you spouse owns a house, when you get married you are allowed to take a 500,000-dollar capital gain rather than a 20...250,000-dollar capital gain as you could as a single person. The rules get a little wishy-washy here. 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 sock in the bank. Also you are gonna save money on auto insurance premiums, homeowner insurance premiums. So there are some good things and two are, two can definitely live more cheaply than.... (Right) You know, two together can live more cheaply than two apart.

And again, you know it's just important to have the money discussion no matter how painful it is, right?
Absolutely. And if you can't do it yourself sit down with an advisor and do it together, but do it.

OK, Jean, thank you so much for the great advice. (Sure!) We appreciate it. And you can find more of Jean’s advice on our website at todayshow. com.