You may already know Alana Semuels from her holiday advice column on The Times' website. With Valentine's Day coming up, she debuts in print as etiquette maven Ask Alana, answering questions about romance and finance.
Relationships are hard enough without the economy being in the crapper. Now that money is tight, annoying financial issues in your relationship or dating life have the potential to become huge craters that could run you off-road.
Dear Alana: I am 32 years old and have worked very hard to have no credit debt. I pay for everything with cash. My question: When I marry, do I have any responsibility for paying off my wife's debt? I find that when I meet women and learn how much they are in debt, I turn and run the other way.
Chris from Simi Valley
Dear Chris: Where are you meeting all these women with debt of such frightening proportions? Pawnshops? The mink counter at the department store? Golddiggers.com?
I know lots of 32-year-old women without debt. Most of them live in China or on some sort of a hippie commune.
If you do marry a mink-wearing woman in debt, be warned that you can be responsible for paying off some of her bills, even if she accrued the debt when she was a young and naive debutante, says Peter Walzer of the Woodland Hills law firm Walzer & Melcher. Although creditors probably can't come after your house, they can garnish your wages and, if you have a shiny red sports car (which is probably how you found the gold digger in the first place), creditors can come after that if her debt was accrued for "a necessity of life" like medical bills, Walzer said.
If you're really worried, you could have her sign a premarital agreement, which is a legal thingy that costs a lot of money and is probably not worth it unless you're a millionaire, he said. You could also do an asset search before you get married, and maybe throw in a criminal background check, plus tests for STDs and AIDS, he said. Although after all those tests, you might be the one who's in debt.
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Dear Alana: If a guy asks you out on a date, the traditional presumption is that he will pay for the date. Say by the second or third date you don't feel the sparks are flying or will ever fly. Should you just let him pay and go on your merry way? Or should you offer to split the bill? One way or the other, how do you do so gracefully?
Lindsay from San Francisco
