Marriage and money

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The honeymoon is over for all of those June brides and grooms. Now it’s home to happily ever after -- and bills, bills, bills. How you handle money at the beginning of your marriage can have an enormous impact on the rest of your lives together. Or your lives not together.

“Fifty percent of all marriages end in dissolution, and the number one reason for that is financial pressures,” says debt expert Howard Dvorkin.

Maybe he’s a bit pessimistic: There’s some evidence that the divorce rate has been diminishing for a couple of decades and may be closer to a third than a half. But his point is well taken. Dvorkin, who runs the Consolidated Credit Counseling Services, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has seen many marriages destroyed by money problems. Clear up the cash at the very beginning, and you can stop all of those arguments before they escalate out of control — and build a prosperous future. Here’s how.

• Pay off the wedding expenses ASAP. The longer debt lingers, the more it prevents you from accomplishing what you really want. Interest rates are on the move up, so any debt you are carrying is likely to start costing more down the road. Look at all the other debt you have as a couple and develop a plan for paying it down. You can use an online debt payoff calculator such as the one here or here .

• Develop a bill-paying system that works for you. It doesn’t really matter whether you both agree to put all of your bills into the same shoebox, or use the latest in Internet banking, as long as you have a system that keeps you paying everything on time. Couples who are commingling their finances for the first time often wind up paying bills late just because they haven’t gotten organized, and that will affect their credit reports and scores.