Chelsea talks to Tasha from One Big Happy about her life, her money, and how she’s saving money by not getting married. Want to hear more from Tasha and Chelsea? Check out this video:
Hey guys it’s chelsea from the financial diet and so as you guys can see today i am in a special place with a special guest i’m actually in dc right now where my guests and i are actually going to the tf t book tour stop right after we shoot this video and my guest here is tasha from one big happy hey guys one big happy is a really awesome youtube channel that
Talks about family and money and everything that it means to deal with both of those things without going crazy and i wanted to talk to tasha about several things today but one of the biggest things i wanted to ask her about was something that she told us about it fincon which we found super fascinating which is that despite loving her partner having a kid with
Him and planning to be with him for life she is not getting married for what i consider to be very fascinating reasons so before we get into talking about all of that tasha why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself what you do how you got here okay so i was born in guyana south america and i came here when i was 2 years old my parents neither one of
Them graduated from high school they had no idea really how to manage finances so they definitely were not able to pass that information on to me and they also knew nothing about college generally because they never went but definitely not how to pay for or even get into college here in the united states so i thought that basically my only option was to join the
Military so that i could get money for college it was not my only option i know that now but i did get money for college and i graduated from college with just $20,000 worth of debt which is not bad but when i was 19 and still in the military i got pregnant by a guy who likes war he loved me and he was gonna marry me and left me when i was three months pregnant
Luckily i did later meet another wonderful man that i did marry when my daughter was two years old and i put myself through college and i got my associates degree in general studies because i didn’t know what i wanted to do and then i went to undergrad at first for nursing and said no that didn’t work so then i did economics and took an extra year so just like
It’s okay to not know what you want to do and then i was still able to get into yale law school because i had great didn’t matter that i went to community college but in law school i took out massive loans to support my family because my husband at the time who is now my ex-husband went back to school too so i ended up graduating from law school with a total of
$200,000 worth of student loans and now i am an attorney i do banking finance and regulatory work and what that means is there are lots of laws out there in place that help protect consumers in credit transactions like buying a house buying a car even down to opening a checking account or like if you have an error in on your like someone stole your identity and
Racked up credit card bills like there are laws that help protect consumers there and so what i do is i help push to strengthen those laws and i make sure that banks are actually complying with those laws because you’d be surprised how like some places will try to circumvent some things and do crazy things that lead to housing crashes so so she helps there not
To be more housing yes well fingers crossed you know fingers crossed well that’s awesome and so now you do in addition to being an attorney and you believe your partner is also an attorney yes you and your partner joseph have this channel one big happy where you talk about family and money and you’ve also talked on the channel about the fact that you are not
Marrying your partner despite being committed and having a child etc so tell us all about that why are you not getting married you not love him i do love him and he loves me and we are actually committed to each other we are not afraid of getting married like a lot of people might think that but no when i went through law school in deciding where i wanted to go
To law school i was actually very thoughtful about where i wanted to go and how much it was going to cost and so i did get into i got into yale i got into harvard i got into stanford and i got into michigan with a full-ride wow and i so i crunched the numbers to see what made the most financial sense and so yale has a loan repayment assistance program that is
Income based where they will repay your loans for you over a 10-year period depending on how much you make it doesn’t even depend on what you’re doing so i could be a hot dog vendor in new york city right now and yale would be repaying my loans but it is income so when i divorced my other husband i decided to go into public interest which was only made possible
By a loan repayment assistance program and then also public service loan forgiveness which is a government program that allows your loans to be forgiven after 10 years of public service that is what i decided to do graduated from law school took my public service job and then got divorced well that was not in the the plans but it happened and so then i met joseph
And he was awesome and wonderful and everything that i now my adult self in my 30s recognized that you should look for in a partner but when we went to combine our finances i looked and crunched the numbers and realized that it would cost us tens of thousands of dollars just because of the way married income is treated mm-hmm and in loss of my loan repayment
Assistance program through yale so yale stops supporting that program if you are married if you make a certain amount and if you’re considered combined then you cross that threshold which you don’t as a single filer right are you guys domestic partners yes yes we are because so my employer does allow some shared insurance benefits as long as you declare yourself to
Be domestic partners so we are it’s interesting so i actually am domestic partners with my fiancee i think it was like maybe six months ago we were meeting with our accountant for the financial diet who was asking us whether or not i was going to get married and i was kind of surprised was like while i’m engaged obviously i’m gonna get married and he’s like don’t
Do it domestic partnerships you know sort of the best bet especially you know as a small business owner there’s a lot of sort of complicating factors and we have looked at the numbers and it will cost us to a degree to be married and that’s something that i think a a lot of people don’t think about but i have to say even for us the fact that he’s not american
Immediately outweighs that because us being married is super important for him to be able to just come and go freely to not be tied to any one job in america but i do think that if he were american we probably wouldn’t get married at this point just because it’s not for me worth what it would cost us financially but i do have that feeling and it feels almost
Embarrassing to admit as someone who considers yourself sort of very feminist and modern about it that it almost would feel like you feel like you have to constantly explain it and justify it and that even if it is a smart financial decision that people will look at you weird do you feel that ever do you feel like you have to justify it so honestly no not in the
Circles that i work in i work in finance i work with people who crunch these numbers all day but i actually didn’t encounter push back on this idea that we could be fully committed to each other and not be married until we made a youtube video about why we weren’t married so tell us about that video so i remember you said that the video kind of blew up and there
Was a lot of negative responses can you kind of describe some of those negative responses sure yeah i was it was kind of mind-blowing and it was the biggest kind of negative push of negativity that we had received on youtube at that point so first of all there were a lot of comments interracial like race-based comments like he won’t marry me because i’m black he
Will find he’s joe i’m just a placeholder until he finds a nice white woman to settle down with you contextual eyes your heart nurse was white yes so i you know our subscribers are great you know you you have your loyal audience and they are there and they support us day in and day out and we love them but it’s just the random people that find you through search
Somehow that just you know they just do that so just want to come be awful now you do wear your engagement ring i do explain that because there’s often i find a lot of pushback around the idea of engagement rings period for sort of modern independent women what is your thought on wearing the ring but not feeling like you need the other part of the symbol some of
It is just honestly a holdover from archaic ways of thinking right we are the products of our environment and so it didn’t feel like we were fully committed until i had a ring and it took time with us living in this new definition of our relationship that we created for me to become more comfortable with it but a ring is really helpful to stop people from hitting
On you like and hitting on him and letting it’s just a symbol of we are taken it doesn’t mean that necessarily we are legally married which doesn’t really make functional any real difference but it’s a symbol to the external world and to each other of our commitment to each other and that’s it so what would you say to people especially the young women watching
This channel who are thinking i didn’t even know it could be more expensive to be married i just assumed that you were incentivized to be married that it’s cheaper to be married what would you encourage them to do in terms of research for their situation so i would say the information is out there you know you have the financial diet you have one big happy you
Have google just educate yourself on the way in which you should be doing anyway on the way your finances work on the way the tax system works any debt you have how that works people think that marriage conveys like all sorts of benefits that you can’t get in any other way but that’s not true you can make medical decisions for your partner by having a medical power
Of attorney you can have a will so you can determine how your estate would be handled if you passed away for example when i died if i died the house would pass to my children and not to joseph because maryland has an estate tax that would tax the proceeds on a house if it was given to someone that was not a direct descendant but that information is out there
You just look up estate tax where i live marriage tax penalty where i live and just read and educate yourself and you should be doing that regardless before you get married to your partner my biggest question i think circles back to the emotional element of so let’s say there is someone watching this channel who thinks i love my partner i want to be committed
To him or her to demonstrate that but maybe it doesn’t make financial sense to be married what do you find are the most like effective ways to demonstrate that commitment and that love without the trappings of marriage for example do you miss not having that party have you replaced that in some way like what are the ways that you show that commitment yeah so
We had a baby so there was that was we having a kid helps and and it took us three years to conceive that baby and so that were there were and we had a miscarriage we suffered a miscarriage during the course of you know trying to conceive and so weathering those kinds of things together really strengthened our relationship but i would say you need to have the
Conversation with your partner and and decide like are we are we in this together is this for life and you have that conversation and that’s basically what it is when you get when you get proposed to right you’ve made the decision that yes we’re going to get married and then you finalize it at the wedding we’ll finalize it now there’s nothing saying that you have
To have you know all these witnesses to make the decision between you and your partner because those witnesses won’t sustain your marriage for the next 40 or 50 years and have the party we just haven’t had the party because we have a teenager so alexis is now 15 and she’s three years away from college we have college to pay for and we have a baby in daycare and
We’ve joseph is also a lawyer so he has a hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of student loans so the party can wait until we take care of our more pressing financial needs yeah and then when we do have the party it’ll be that much more meaningful because we will have really worked towards it and know and knew that we prioritize creating the best lives for
Ourselves and our children over just conforming to what society tells us that we need to be so thank you so so much for joining us tasha you guys all have to check out one big happy it we’ll be linking to their video on the marriage tax penalty as well as the video about why they’re not getting married don’t read the mean comments it will drag all of us down so
As always guys thank you for watching and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button and to come back every tuesday for new and awesome videos bye you
Transcribed from video
Why You Might Not Want To Get Married | The Financial Diet By The Financial Diet
