Financial Intimacy: How to Create a Healthy Relationship with Your Money and Your Mate »

Jacquette M. Timmons, a national investment expert and financial coach, is the founder of Sterling Investment Management, a New York–based investment education and financial coaching firm. She has worked in the investment industry for 23 years and conducts numerous personal finance and stock market investing workshops.

There is a commonly held perception that we don’t talk about money. Actually, we talk about it all the time—we are just having the wrong conversation. The result: finances fracture and even destroy many relationships.

In this timely book, money expert Jacquette M. Timmons addresses the financial issues that couples face, examining how family background, personal choices, and socioeconomic and cultural influences affect the way women merge love and money. Encouraging women first to explore their own relationship with money, she provides a framework for an honest exchange of information so partners can understand each other’s personal financial stories, the many emotions money elicits in them, and their financial preferences, prejudices, and tolerance levels.

In these uncertain economic times, more and more couples are learning the hard way that a lack of financial intimacy can sabotage even the best relationships. Timmons gives women the tools they need to take the lead in the financial dialogue so they can live wealthy and well with their partner—in good times and bad.

Publishers Weekly

Concerned that her friends—“college educated, savvy and otherwise smart professional women”—were not honestly discussing their financial situations with their partners, Timmons, founder of an investment firm, explores the reasons for their reluctance and how it can be a ticking time bomb in a relationship. She interviews a wide spectrum of women, 17 of whom are spotlighted in the book; her subjects are single, divorced, widowed, straight and gay—and share in their anxiety and inability to come clean about their finances and discuss money with their partners in sufficient “detail and depth.” Written as a combination of “how come” and “how to,” Timmons deals firmly with the “Prince Charming Effect,” urging women to develop good financial habits without expecting a man to care for them. These tips, along with thoughtful discussion questions, will encourage women to think more carefully about taking control—and Timmons's firm, encouraging tone will help them learn to communicate about a subject that is too frequently—and foolishly—considered taboo. (Oct.)