Paying for Fertility Treatments: How One Couple Financed their Path to Parenthood
The plan, Jonathan recalls, was straightforward: Marry his fiancée, get away for a honeymoon, and get down to the business of starting a family.
“My wife was 39 and I’d just turned 40,” he says. “We wanted to have kids, and we also knew time wasn’t necessarily on our side.”
The wedding and honeymoon were beautiful. But soon after their return—and after several months of trying to conceive without success—they started to worry, and decided to see a doctor. “We figured she would tell us everything was fine, but then she ordered tests.”
The news wasn’t good: He and his wife were infertile. They might still have children, their doctor told them, but not without medical assistance. “Becoming parents would require a special procedure,” Jonathan says. “And it was going to cost us a lot of money.”
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It’s not exactly the most fun thing to sit down and figure out whether the person you’re dating is on the same page as you financially—in fact, you could practically call it a buzzkill. But if you’re serious about one another, talking about credit scores, budgets, and debt is not something you should put off, because one money mistake can be all it takes to get you into serious and immediate financial trouble.
It’s hard enough to budget and track your own spending and saving habits, but when your dreams are shared and depend on the equal due diligence of another person, you have even less control over how quickly you get there. So you’ll want to find out sooner rather than later if you align on how you handle your money, before it potentially becomes an issue.
Here are five tips to help you determine whether you and your partner are a good “money match.”