Critique a "Talk" please?

[regencygirl]

DH and I have been asked to join our Parish's marriage prep team and lead a Pre-Cana session on Fiance. We're not financial advisors, the goal of this talk is to give the engaged couples somethings to think about, and a sort of "here's the mistakes we made, hopefully you can learn from them" type of thing. 

To start, I found a quote that talks about how people always say it's money problems that lead to divorce, but it's actually a lack of compatibility in financial matters than a lack of money, and how you need shared goals and visions.

DH and I will then give a little about our backgrounds, how we were raised and our pre-marriage attitudes to money. From there we'll go into how we started to merge our finances when we got engaged, and some of the discussions we had.

Subtopics will include:
 - Your wedding vows include "for richer or poorer" - what does that mean to each of you? 
 - Budget basics - including things like, what do you expect in terms of a house, car, vacations, even stuff as simple as clothing or the fact that one of you is ok getting store brand stuff, but the other will only eat Eggo waffles?
- Career expectations - do you know what each makes? What the future might hold for that job? Are you willing to live with salary limitations?  What about SAHM or SAHD? Whose career takes priority, are you willing to live on one income? (I have two ancedotes about friends who faced these problems, one couple had all these discussions before marriage and were prepared, the other didn't and wound up divorced after what she expected didn't happen.)
- Debt - how comfortable are you with debt? How comfortable are you with how the other person acquired their debt? How that will affect things like new cars, vacations, etc. 
- Savings Goals- where do you see yourself in 5, 10, 25 years? How do you see your retirement? How comfortable are you with investments? (what do you do if someone wants a high risk investment and you're not a high risk type of person?)
   Kids and savings - college savings? wedding for a child? Who pays? Do you want to help, pay for it all? 
- Charity - this is a Catholic Parish, we're supposed to impart the value of charity, which I do agree should be a line item in your budget, although the idea of tithing isn't something I'm totally comfortable with given the varying socio-economic levels in my parish. We plan on just talking about seeing God's blessings in our lives and the desire to give back some of that and hope the priest who helps facilitate the sessions isn't in the room. 

Something that I wish we'd talked about before marriage was lending money to or accepting loans from family. We've done both and it's lead to some arguments and I wish I'd known about some of his attitudes before we did either. Would that be weird to include in a talk on finances? 

Is there anything you'd add or change? Anything you wish you'd talked about regarding money before you got married? If you made it this far, thanks for reading and any input!! 

[ering1115]

I am still tainted by my pre-Cana experience and the fact that people were criticized for having households where both parents worked and the children were put in "stranger care". They literally told me that God would provide and we needed to be open to it. Staying at home is fine by me/ working is fine by me- calling daycare "stranger care" and making blanket assumptions is wrong.

So- that and people popping out more kids because Jesus said so even though their docs said they could die are 2 things I would stay far away from.

DH had to make me sit down more than once so we could get that stupid piece of paper and get married. This was at the diocese and not our church- we have a much different vibe at our parish.

[Deleted]

I did Pre-Cana and the best part of it was the couple who came and spoke with us. They were incredibly honest about their flaws and how they dealt with them as a team. They seemed very genuine and portrayed a realistic view of marriage. I say realistic because it wasn't ALL about prayer and God and birth control like the rest of the two day ordeal. I'm sure that for some prayer enters into every single action of every single day, but I think many people preparing for marriage want to hear about and be prepared for the every day conflicts and decisions that may come up. For your talk in particular, I would have liked to hear about some actual financial conflicts that you and your H have or had and how you are working through them.

The rest of our Pre-Cana was God awful with the idiot leader talking about how every form of birth control has killed at least one person. Condoms cause anaphylactic shock on a daily basis don'tcha know.