Hello and welcome to on-demand radio with The Market Guys. I'm AJ Monte. Today we have with us Sam Goller who's the co-author of "Yes You Can Achieve Financial Harmony." Welcome Sam. Glad to have you with us.

Thank you AJ. Great to be here.

Well Sam, Deborah was not able to join the call with us, but Deborah Shoush is your co-author. Tell us a little bit about how you picked the "Yes You Can" series because we just mentioned "Yes You Can Achieve Financial Harmony" but you do have a series of books that cover a number of topics. How did you develop these?

Right. This is actually the fifth book in the series. The other four books, it began with a book written by Jim Stowers, who's founder of American Century Investments, and the title of his book is "Yes You Can Achieve Financial Independence." And what we were trying to do with the series of books is make them approachable for all people, make the topic of financial literacy and financial independence approachable to all people at all life stages. So the other titles of the book are "Yes You Can Raise Financially Aware Kids," that's for parents to teach their children to appreciate the value of a dollar. "Yes You Can Afford to Raise a Family," and that's for mom and dad to appreciate the priceless joy of raising kids without going broke. "Yes You can Find More Meaning in your Life," which kind of takes a more whole life approach to not only financial independence but also other factors that play into living a meaningful life like education and personal relationships And then this book, the fifth in the series, "Yes You Can Achieve Financial Harmony."

Well you know we have a lot of talking points here, and we'll probably have to get you back to cover some of the other books that you've written. Now Achieve Financial Harmony I understand is for couples, especially newlyweds who are challenged with how to deal with things like debt issues, spending, and other topics. What would you say the number one thing couples need to avoid to stay out of the money troubles later in their marriage.

Probably the number one thing they need to avoid, and it's interesting you ask the question that way because usually the question comes out, what's the number one thing they should do. But the number one thing they should avoid is avoiding having the conversation about money. You know, bystepping that very important dialogue.

Which is a tough topic. I mean it's not something people really want to address, especially early on in their marriage because everything is happy and bliss, and you don't want to bring up the ugly things which really need to be taken care of immediately, I would assume.

You're absolutely right, you know you say, who wants to talk about that at the beginning of the marriage, but really where that dialogue needs to happen is way before the marriage starts. You know, as soon as you're in a relationship and you're serious about the other person, and you know you're headed down that path to matrimony, that's the time you need to be having the dialogue, talking about money. You know, you think about it...
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