Sara Rathner

Because if you're with somebody who maybe has never invested at all for retirement and you're going to be with them for several decades, eventually that's going to catch up with both of you and you're just not going to have as much money available to be financially secure in your retirement.

And so people are thinking long term, is this something that's going to impact our ability to meet our shared goals as a couple?

And it could be.

Sean, you talk about making it work.

If you are in a relationship with somebody that is in a tough financial situation, they haven't had the ability to save much, maybe they're living paycheck to paycheck, they don't have savings for retirement or other goals, making it work with them is not burying your head in the sand as a couple.

Making it work is talking about it and coming up with some sort of plan that makes sense for the two of you going forward.

So you can still set joint financial goals together, but in a way that honors where both of you are and where both of you hope to be.

You don't want to, oh, my partner has like six figures of credit card debt.

La la, whatever.

No.

Let's talk about it.

Let's talk about how we can move towards some sort of progress.

And what does progress look like realistically?

rather than just ignoring the problem.

Oh, I mean, well, I'll throw out another stat from the survey that I disagree with.

So we asked folks a bunch of questions about different things they would consider to be red flags.

42% said talking about money early in a relationship would be a red flag for them.

Nope.

I think that I'm in good company here in saying that I disagree with this.

You don't have to bring your most recent tax return to your third date or anything like that, but talk about money from the earliest stages of your relationship.