Robert Brokamp

Welcome to Motley Fool Money, Elizabeth.

I guess it is.

All right, so let's set the stage.

It was the year 2000.

We'd been married for less than a year at that point, and we both worked at The Motley Fool.

We decided to write our manifesto, and then we turned it into an article, even though neither of us were actually official writers for The Motley Fool at the time.

What do you remember about how we came up with the idea and how we wrote it?

When we were dating, we were poor elementary school teachers, so money wasn't much of an issue because we frankly just didn't have very much money.

Then we got married, eventually realized that there could be some problem areas, maybe being a little less comfortable with how far a bank account could go before we panicked.

So once we combined our finances, we figured it was time to get more aligned and formalize our financial manifesto.

I don't remember how we got the fool to publish it, but it did end up taking on somewhat of a life of his own.

It ended up being among the most popular articles for the year 2000, which then led to an online webinar and then a book that we contributed to, which I think just goes to show that many couples recognize that some sort of written financial plan is probably a good idea.

All right, so let's move on to the manifesto itself.

It had five components, each of which had, I guess you would call it a title and a subtitle.

And we'll take turns taking the lead and describing each, the first one being, what's more important, a house or a hamburger, or in other words, prioritize and post.

Nowadays, people talk about the latte factor, which is about how foregoing a daily cup of fancy coffee and instead investing it can lead to tens of thousands of dollars over the long term.

But I guess we were kind of ahead of the curve because we were putting it in context of hamburgers.

But that's kind of what we were getting at here.

As for the grades, I'd give us a B plus.

I would say the B plus for me because I still make a lot of small purchases that I probably shouldn't.