To hear Summer Brown and Briana Biddle talk about it, their upcoming wedding and civil commitment will be a fairy tale, complete with happily ever after.
But fairy tales can turn dark pretty quickly, and a look at the couple's finances shows that the poisoned apple in this story could be money.
Let's start with the wedding: Brown has a $986 wedding dress and a $2,600 engagement ring, both bought on credit. Then there are older debts: a $20,000 time share on which Biddle is not making payments and $17,000 in student loans for Brown, among others.
To the rescue rides financial planner Alfred McIntosh, who has agreed to look at the couple's finances as part of The Times' Money Makeover series.
Except here's where the fairy tale skids into reality: If the couple, who together earn about $79,000, don't clean up their finances, happily ever after is going to be awfully hard to reach.
"This situation requires change from both of you, quite honestly," McIntosh, founder of McIntosh Capital Advisors in Los Angeles, told the women when he met with them this month.
Biddle, 28, and Brown, 27, met four years ago as students at Cal State Northridge and fell in love last year. They share a Pico Rivera apartment with an affectionate, high-energy pack of three small dogs and a cat.
Like many young people, they're learning the hard way about managing their money -- by overspending, underestimating how much income they need and generally getting in over their heads. Now, they say, it's time to get out of debt and set realistic goals for saving and spending money.
Although a domestic partnership between two people of the same sex is not legally considered to be a marriage in California, Brown and Biddle would assume many of the same risks that married couples run, such as the higher earner potentially becoming responsible for spousal support of the other, according to family law attorney Melissa Mayer of Mayer & Glassman in Los Angeles.
Because they plan to register as domestic partners with the state, any dissolution of the partnership would have to be legally formalized, often involving many of the same costs and complications as in a divorce, she said.
Brown earns an annual salary of $45,000 from a nonprofit social services agency where she counsels troubled children to help them stay with their families. She is working toward her license as a therapist. Biddle makes $34,000 a year from the Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, where she advocates for deaf people who are looking for jobs. It's exhausting work for both of them.
