Second marriage and money: Blending families with finances

Jan. 18, 2024

This paid piece is sponsored by First National Wealth Management.

Opening a joint account, buying a house together and doing estate planning all before getting married?

Jaime and Curtis Taets, a couple from the Twin Cities area, took a unique approach to merging their finances — but that’s what you have to do when entering a second marriage.

While the couple is based in Minnesota, Jaime often works with businesses in Sioux Falls as CEO of her firm, Keystone Group International.

The Taetses recently joined Adam Cox, head of First National Wealth Management, on an episode of the local “Common Cents on the Prairie”™ podcast to share their story of blending families and finances.

Check out the recap of their conversation below. And, when you’re ready, you can watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your favorite streaming app.

Second marriage and money

Adam: The reason why we’re doing this episode is to highlight something that not a lot of people talk about. A lot of people get divorced, and a lot of people get remarried, and the reality is that it’s difficult to not only merge your lives but to merge your financial lives when you’re getting remarried.

That’s something a lot of couples struggle with So, we’re going to talk through how you two did it. How did you meet?

Jaime: Playing sand volleyball.

Adam: Like everybody meets, obviously. As you started dating, how quickly did you start talking about money? And how did those conversations go?

Curt: In the very beginning, you know, it’s the gentlemanly thing to pay for the meals. I did more than my fair share. And then, with Jaime being phenomenal, she was like: “No, I’ll get this one. I’ll get this one.”

Doing that on a regular basis, there was certainly a sense that if we’re going to do something, it shouldn’t be my responsibility. It shouldn’t be hers. It’s a joint, shared thing.

So when we got more serious in our relationship, we had a conversation to open a joint account. On a monthly basis, we both put a set amount in there, and that’s how we paid for everything we did together.

Jaime: Our fun money.

Adam: There are three big things that I pulled from your story that I thought were really interesting, and that was one of them. Actually, all three of these things happened before you got married. What else did you learn through that process of dipping your toe in the water and combining finances for the first time?

Jaime: A divorce can be financially devastating. It changes your retirement plan, when you thought you were going to retire and just so many things.

I didn’t balance a checkbook, and I didn’t live on a budget. With Curt it was like, “We’re going to budget, and we’re going to talk about where the money goes.” And I’m grateful for that because there was never shame. It was a very logical conversation.

It started me on this path of understanding that there’s a lot of planning you can do that makes you feel very safe. The joint account was an initial thing and a small thing, but it made me feel secure that we both were OK with talking about money.

And then we bought a house, and we went into a mortgage before we were married. A lot of this budgeting came up because that’s a really big decision, and we have a family of six, so it was not a small house.

At first, I was like, “Why are we talking about this level of budgeting?” I’d never done this before. It’s probably because I’m an entrepreneur; I take risks, right? But he was so focused on how much money we had put away to cover if someone got sick, if my business took a turn, if he lost his job.

That’s that safety and security as an entrepreneur that looking back, I can now make the big decisions in my business because he’s given us that steady foundation.

Adam: I think that when a lot of couples have conversations like this, that can create conflict. But it sounds like the two of you really respected each other and the way you approached money.

Jaime: In full transparency, it’s not like all of these conversations were easy right out of the gate. They were hard because it was like, “Well, I enjoyed that,” or “I’d rather put more here.” And so there was a lot of negotiation and compromise.

Adam: The third thing you did before marriage, which I found to be the most fascinating, was you went through the estate planning process together. Why did you decide to do that?

Jaime: It seems crazy now. It didn’t seem crazy to us when we were doing it.

Curt: Because we’ve already gone through a divorce, and now we’re remarried, we had to close off what we had done before. Everything was left to the other person. So part of this was, if…