Ask Carrie by Carrie Schwab-Pomerantz

The new year has always been a good time to take a look at past spending patterns and resolve to do better in the future. But what if you're in a relationship? Can you make these decisions alone? Of course you can, but chances are you won't be as effective — and the results won't be as rewarding — unless you sit down with your husband, wife or partner and approach your financial New Year's resolutions together.

Money matters for a couple can be tricky and often lead to misunderstanding and worse. With things being tougher than usual, now may be a really good time to take a fresh and honest look at your financial issues as a couple. If it's not something you're used to doing, it might seem a bit touchy at first. But I believe that talking openly and honestly about your mutual and individual goals and your personal feelings about money can actually strengthen your relationship.

Where should you start? Here are a few sometimes sticky — but essential — areas to cover.

— Be honest about financial independence. Whether you're a new couple or "old marrieds," the issue of financial independence needs to be front and center. Joining forces doesn't necessarily mean joining your finances — at least not completely. And each of you may have a different view of what financial independence means. If you've been together for some time, your ideas about independence may have changed. So make sure you're on the same page.

Begin by taking a look at your daily financial responsibilities. Make sure you're comfortable with who's paying for what bills, whether or not to maintain separate bank accounts and how you're dealing with your individual expenses. If you have some differences here, settle them first. Because how you deal with the everyday can be the basis for how you save and invest.

For instance, if you have a joint account for communal expenses, but keep separate accounts for your personal needs, then you've already established a bit of independence that you can carry over into investing. On the other hand, if you currently pool all your money, do you want to take the same approach with your portfolios? That's a crucial question to answer. Once you agree on how much autonomy - or togetherness — you want in your investing, you can decide whether having a shared brokerage account, separate brokerage accounts or separate accounts plus a shared account is the best for both of you.

On a personal level, I believe that a certain degree of independence can be good for a relationship. That said, I also recognize that every couple is different. For instance, my husband and I have a joint brokerage account, but we also keep separate accounts. (One of mine is a small inheritance from my grandmother that's very important and personal to me.) But while we invest some of our money separately, we do enjoy talking about our goals and our individual investment choices, and we help each other make decisions. On the other hand, a colleague of mine and his wife have joint accounts for everything and consult each other on every expenditure and every investing decision, and that works well for them.

— Discuss your individual feelings about risk. Apart from independence, investing style is an important factor in how you handle your assets. The potential for higher returns generally comes with higher risk, but you have to think carefully about how much volatility you can handle. So it's essential to discuss your individual risk tolerance. If you can come to terms with an approach that works for both of you, investing together — whether all or just a portion of your assets — can be a great way to plan for the future.

If you completely disagree on how much risk to take, you might be better off with separate investment portfolios.

But you don't need to completely agree either. Even if one of you is more comfortable with risk while the other is more conservative, this difference can actually work in your favor by providing a balance — and the necessary diversification of investments that goes with it. The important thing is to talk it through.

Review your couple goals. Before you were a couple, you probably each had individual goals. Have these changed since you've been together? Do your joint goals take precedence over your individual goals?

If you have three distinct sets of goals — yours, mine and ours — there's nothing that says you can't work harmoniously toward all three simultaneously. Having a separate brokerage account for each of you plus a joint account can be a good way to target your investing toward specific goals without one or the other of you feeling short-changed. You could each manage your own accounts and share the decision-making in your joint account. Either way, by working together you're more likely to achieve your goals.

Look at the big picture. Whether you're investing everything together or choosing to maintain separate investing accounts, it's a good idea to view your financial picture as a whole.

If you're just starting out together and you decide to put your individual assets in a single brokerage account, you'll probably need to rebalance your joint portfolio. Combining your investments creates a new big picture, one that might be overweighted in some areas and underweighted in others. For example, different mutual funds can invest in the same companies or sectors. This might lessen the diversification in your joint portfolio and compromise your protection if a particular company or sector drops.

Similarly, if you both work for the same company and both hold a lot of that company's stock, you may want to consider selling a portion of that and diversifying into something else.

If you invest separately, it's still wise to periodically view your overall asset allocation — all your accounts together, including your retirement accounts. Ideally, you want your investments to work together, while avoiding extremes like having one overly aggressive account and one totally conservative account. As you look at your big investment picture, make sure that 1) your individual accounts reflect your personal investing styles and make good sense as stand alone accounts, and 2) that they work together to meet both your individual and shared goals.

Reviewing your accounts in the context of the whole will also help you make rebalancing decisions as the markets or your goals change.

— Realize that commingling your assets is "forever." This is an important concept, especially when it comes to an inheritance, because once you commingle your assets in an account, it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) to separate them out. For example, I know a woman who inherited some money from her father. Without thinking too much about it, she put it in a joint account with her husband. Now she wishes that she had kept it separate, not because she's even remotely considering divorce or because she doesn't want to share it with her husband, but because she feels a personal tie to her father's legacy. With the money in a joint account, she doesn't have quite the same autonomy.

Talk and share your plans for the future.

There's no right or wrong way to marry your finances. But like anything else in a relationship, it requires some give and take, some trust and tolerance. Use the New Year as a motivation to look at what's most important to each of you and refine your goals and your shared financial plan. If you talk honestly about your feelings — towards money, investing and your dreams for the future — it will be easier to come up with the best way to make those dreams a reality.

Carrie Schwab Pomerantz is Chief Strategist, Consumer Education, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., Member SIPC. You can e-mail Carrie at askcarrie@schwab.com. To find out more about Carrie Schwab Pomerantz and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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