5 Financial Questions To Ask Before Getting Married

Share your views on money before you vow to stay together 'for richer or poorer.'

No one needs to know you started pinning ideas for the wedding after your second date. Planning is a good thing!

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Although money matters aren't nearly as fun as picking out the theme, the colors, the cake flavor or the wedding gown, discussing your philosophies on budgeting is just as important as anything else you plan for your married life ahead. An alarming number of couples eventually break up over money. (Don't be one of them!)

It doesn't have to be boring. On your next date night, make plans to meet somewhere new—a rooftop, the lake, the new lounge downtown—but take some time to hear what your significant other has to say about money. If you're not sure about your Primary and Secondary Money Personalities, take ten minutes and find out with our free, scientific Money Personality Quiz.

Lovebirds; before you say ‘I do’, remember to talk about the money.

Money matters. Don't let any one tell you different. You could set yourself up for major pitfall by not taking the time to talk about money issues before walking down the aisle.

Here are some questions to discuss with your partner

How Do They Budget? 

 If you can live off less and save more, you can achieve bigger goals. Seeing how your partner budgets is essential to your financial health as an a couple. Start out by budgeting something small together, like a vacation months in advance. Or maybe plan the trip as a reward for monitoring monthly expenses, growth of savings, and prompt bill payments.

To Join or Not to Join Credit?

 Couples should talk about whether they prefer joint credit card accounts or to retain their individual ones. Its also an option for each of you to have a separate account and a joint account for joint ventures such as vacations, saving for children’s college, a new home, etc. Note, when joining accounts beware of balance transfer fees.

What are Their Future Money Goals?

 As a couple, adhering to your future financial goals will affect your present actions. If as a couple you are looking to save money, you might cut back on certain expenses such as excess dining out and other recreational activities, in favor of more home-based or free activities. Experts recommend that couples save at least three to six months’ living expenses as a buffer in case of any emergency such as job loss, illness or family emergency.

How Much Do They Owe?

 We all know debt comes from a variety of places, so it’s feasible that your new partner will have racked up some along the way. Once you know the ins and outs of your partners’ debt, it is up to you to make a decision of whether or not to keep separate credit cards and credit card histories or merge them. Many advisors will advise against joining accounts.

If there are questions that you still haven’t asked or answers that your still searching for, don’t hesitate to sit down in front of your financial advisor with your partner. Practicing honest and open communication before your wedding day will only fine-tune the skills for when you two are actually married. Just think of it as good practice.

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Dont Underestimating the Power of Love

Love Is Trite

Love is simply the most discussed, most sung about, most poemed (is that a word?), most cried over, laughed over topic in the world, ever. There is nothing new to say about love. You've heard it so many times, it's easy to dismiss, even if you believe in the power of love.

Yet did you see those photos of hers? The presence of love took the ordinary and made it glow. The next time I go up to my kitchen, you can bet I'll be looking at my peeler differently.

I know I don't have to convince you about the power of love. But I feel I do need to open all of our eyes to remembering the power of it.

Love Needs Context

In my tradition of Sufism, love is talked about needing both an object and a subject. A lover and a beloved. Without a beloved, the one loved, love is not activated, engaged. It does not come alive.

And without a lover, the one who loves, love has nowhere to live.

When we talk about bringing heart into business, we're talking about love. But what we're really talking about is the miraculous, immersive experience that happens between the lover and the beloved, and how that affects everyone around.

If you are bringing love to your business, what is your context? Who is the beloved, who is the lover?

Love is (Often) Hidden

Take a moment right now. Close your eyes. Put your hand over your heart. Allow your lungs to fill with a gentle, full breath. Now, in your heart, ask for love.

Open your eyes. Look at something to do with your business. Keep your eyes open. Put your hand over your heart. Allow your lungs to fill with a gentle, full breath. In your heart, ask to witness love within whatever you are looking at.

Take your time. Sometimes our previous experiences veil the deeper witnessing of love from us. Look at your phone, or your computer, or your desk. Look at a pile of paper you need to clean up. Ask to witness the deeper love in it.

What changes? What becomes possible?

Love Requires You

You may need love, but love also needs you. As Mevlana Jallalu'ddin Rumi wrote, "The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep."

Be awake to love. Honor the lover and beloved in each context. Look deeper for what is hidden.

By Mark H Silver

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The Power of Love - Discovering the Love That Lies Within Us All

To feel love for someone and their love in return is the most wonderful experience of our lives. When we feel love, we experience joy and fulfillment, but when it is absent we rapidly become unhappy and disillusioned. The search for love defines our lives and plays a critical role in the quality of our relationships. Love really does make our world go round!

Unfortunately we are rarely given any teaching about love, and yet with a little understanding and awareness it can transform our lives. Love can solve problems and heal emotional pain, but only when we allow ourselves to experience its power - we must invite love into our lives.

Consider for a moment the times when you have fallen in love or felt the love of a parent, child or friend. It is almost impossible to describe those comforting feelings of connection and well-being. Notice how anxieties and problems fall away to be replaced by solutions, ease and confidence. There is a timeless quality about love that buoys you up and protects you in even the most despairing of times. You are experiencing the power of love to heal and bring joy and success into your life.

Love is the fundamental truth of life. We are born to love and be loved. It is our natural state. Some people prefer to see this love as a characteristic of our humanity while others prefer to see it as the manifestation of a divine or spiritual source of love. Whatever our personal belief, the power of love is experienced when we connect open-heartedly with others and embrace our natural connections.

Our emotional and relationship problems result from our denial of love - our separation from the love that bonds all people and separation from our higher or spiritual source of love. This denial usually starts when we are very young and has a damaging impact on our lives. Perversely, we invent all manner of negative thoughts, feelings and behaviours to distract us from the love that we already possess. In romantic relationships we then search for love from another person, or try to gain fulfillment from material possessions, to replace the love that we believe is lacking within. This is a terrible mistake because until we have rediscovered self-love, we cannot give or receive love fully from somebody else.

Luckily the best place to work on finding self-love is within a supportive relationship. All relationships have their challenges and it is by working with our partner through the difficult times that a partnership is strengthened. Relationships fail because of our inability to get to the core emotional issues that create the separation. These will be our fears and insecurities and lack of self-belief. In our attempt to hide away any sense of low self-worth we make ourselves unavailable to our partner. It is like building a fortress around ourselves - we think it protects us but in reality it damages or even destroys our relationships.

The way to embrace our loving essence and our natural connections with others is to be willing to feel all our emotions and communicate about them maturely to our partners. We can also ask them about there feelings and commit to working with them to heal any fear.. Normally we will find that they have just the same fears and insecurities as us, but may play them out in different styles. Getting to these core issues is the key to healing the pain and fear in a relationship and to becoming more bonded.

As we achieve such healing within our relationships we will automatically discover more success in our lives, we will feel more fulfilled and this will make us happier. We can all do this if we can find the courage to feel our emotions and reveal them within our relationships. As our hearts open we will feel all the love that has been hidden behind our defenses and our relationships will go from strength to strength.

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The Power of Giving Unconditional Love

"You can't give love to someone else without knowing how to give yourself love first."

According to humanistic psychology, human beings have an inner need and desire to give and receive high quality love. Love is the glue that holds together human society and without it our lives have little meaning or purpose. In fact, our need to give high quality love to others drives us towards behaviors that would otherwise be considered insane, such as mother rushing into a raging fire to save her child or a father working night and day at a job he hates in order to provide sustenance for his family. Modern Western society has focused quite a bit of attention on how to attract, possess, and maintain love in one's own life, but it often misses the main secret of attracting love--that if you give love unconditionally from the heart, you will get love back in abundance from the unlimited supply the universe holds.

What is Unconditional Love?

Before we define what unconditional love is, we should first clarify what love means in the context of this article. Genuine love for another person simply means the continual desire and the act of increasing the level of happiness in another person's life. It's important that we understand exactly what unconditional love is so that we can know exactly how to express it completely to ourselves and towards others, as well as fully appreciating it when it is offered to us by others. Unconditional love is the ability to accept, respect, and care for yourself and others without any conditions, limitations or reservations attached to that love. Unconditional love is the practice of giving of love to others without demanding that they perform behaviors that you desire. This kind of love is best portrayed by the love between a mother and her child. Unconditional love has little to do with romance, friendships or relationships and more to do with an abundance of love for yourself which flows out from your body and attracts good things and people into your life like a magnet.

When describing unconditional love towards yourself, it means the pure acceptance of everything that is you, including all your flaws and weaknesses. Really this is the basis of unconditional love because love in its true form cannot be shared or given to someone else until you love and accept yourself first. There are no boundaries or limits on love that is unconditional. You are not trying to control the actions or behaviors of the other person, nor do you impose conditions on your love by restricting that love if they behave or don't behave a certain way. Unconditional love is the ability to want what's best for others in their pursuit of universal happiness, irregardless of your own opinions and biases of them or their behavior. Unconditional love is an overflow of positive energy that comes from the complete love that you have for yourself so no matter what the other person's says or does; it will not affect your level of happiness.

The Benefits of Unconditional Love

The practice of giving unconditional love requires by its very nature that you don't expect anything directly in return for giving it to others. By providing unconditional love to others, you are expressing your faith that good things will be drawn into your life through the law of attraction. Here are some benefits of giving unconditional love:

o The act of giving unconditional love to others eliminates the fear of anger and reprisal from other people for any behavior you do. It also facilitates open and honest relationships with other people.

o In a more spiritual sense, sharing your love unconditionally with the world sends out positive energy which will be returned to you in one form or another to create great abundance, wealth, and goodness that you deserve in your own life.

o When you provide unconditional love to others, you are not dependent on others for happiness, but rather you derive your happiness from within. Your energy radiates to those around you and the world gives back to you in abundance.

o When you give love unconditionally, then you can't be ever angry at anyone. All human minds need congruency of thought and it's simply impossible to hate another person if you have made the conscious decision that you are going to love them unconditionally.

o By giving unconditional love to others, you side-step any tricks, emotional ploys, and unfair negotiating tactics because you have consciously choses to take responsibility for giving them love from own heart despite the behaviors that they exhibit.

Happiness Comes from Within

Those people who try to find their love and happiness in the possessions, places or people they have in their life are destined to be miserable in life because they fail to understand that true happiness can only be found within themselves. Everlasting joy, happiness and love all come from falling in love with yourself. The people, places and things that you attract into your life that make you happy only serve to enhance the love that you already have for yourself. They can never replace that inner love. If you want to practice giving unconditional love, then the first person you must show true love to first is yourself. Love yourself for the person that you are, which includes all your flaws as well as your strengths.

How to Practice Giving Unconditional Love

To practice unconditional love is simple, yet you must make a conscious decision to act on accordingly. You must first make the conscious decision that no matter what the other person thinks, says or does, you are going to provide them with the same amount of love that you would if they treated you like royalty. More importantly, you make the firm commitment that you are going to provide them with unconditional love freely and without harboring any negative intentions.

 o Unconditionally love yourself first. The first person that you need to show unconditional love to first is yourself. After all, you are married to yourself for the rest of your life, whether you like it or not. Learn to love everything about you because even your flaws make you unique and special. Once you fall in love with yourself, then the world opens up in abundance to your life.

o Don't use "if-then" clauses with your love. The use of "if-then" clauses makes the love conditional, even if you only say it inside your own mind. For example, "If you treat me well, then I will show you affection." Unconditional love exists without any "if-then" statements.

o Write what you love about yourself. In your journal or on a piece of paper, write 15 qualities that you love about yourself. This will help you visualize and memorize all the great qualities that you possess. After you finish writing those qualities down, repeat them out loud to yourself

o Unconditional love is not automatic. Always remember that unconditional love is something that you must decide to give, not something that is automatically given. It requires practice to give love to those that you don't like and to accept everyone for who they are, regardless of your opinions about them.

o Don't give love with expectation in mind. If you expect something back in return for your love, then that makes the love you give conditional in nature. Instead, have the faith to believe that what you put out there in the world will eventually come back to you, but don't expect it at that very moment to be returned.

o Repeat it in your mind. If you get upset at yourself or another person, then immediately begin to say over and over in your mind, "I love [Person] unconditionally, no matter what they say or do." Your mind cannot hate a person and love them at the same time because it is not congruent thinking, so it immediately removes much of the anger and hatred that builds inside of you if you repeat statements of love in your mind.

o Write it down. If any negative thoughts enter your mind about yourself or another person in your life, then destroy those thoughts with the power of writing. In your journal or on a piece of paper, write 15 things that you love about the other person and after you are done, repeat it out loud. This cancels out your negative thoughts of the person and it sows the seeds of unconditional love for that person in your subconscious mind.

Conclusion

When you fall in love with yourself, you give yourself the ultimate power to pick up the pen and begin to write your own book rather than having other people write it for you. You are able to tap into the unlimited potential that is within you. It's like a spark that ignites your heart and that passion spreads to your mind and your body. Everything in life becomes crystal clear. When you fall in love with yourself, the world opens up to you in abundance.  
 ~Tristan Loo

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5 Inspirational Love Quotes - The Power of Love!

Ah, the power of love!

..In all its forms:

* Passion,

* Romance,

* Understanding, etc...

Love is everywhere, it really is, love is in all aspects of our lives. And love is revealed (or its absence is revealed) wherever we look too.

And the following 5 inspirational love quotes (and explanations) go some small way in showing this to be true. Enjoy. Oh, and love - always love!

1. "A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous." -- Ingrid Bergman

Here, Ingrid Bergman refers to a love that all of us yearn for, fondly remember or even actively participate in: romantic love!

And she's right, sometimes words just get in the way, and sometimes a kiss says everything you need to know! (Sometimes kissed are great ways of avoiding words, too, but today is not about being cynical...)

Next, Bertrand Russell - possibly speaking from experience - urges us all to embrace the opportunities of love fully:

2. "Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness." -- Bertrand Russell

And perhaps what Bertrand is really saying here is that love is the greatest opportunity that life presents to any of us. And a life that makes best use of opportunities is a life best lived, is a happy life.

3. "You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love." -- Henry Drummond

And I guess Henry Drummond, with these words, is in agreement.

I guess he's saying that life really is more fun when love has been behind what we do. Much more enabling, much more empowering, much MORE... than when fear is the motive behind our actions.

And I think that this is true of the individual as it is of society, of business, and of government - as reflected in these wise words of Jimi Hendrix:

4. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace." -- Jimi Hendrix

And the meek will well and truly have inherited the world too, Jimi, when this happens. But I think we are a long way off this 'perfect' state.

Still, you can never ever underestimate the power of love. Nor the power of patience.

5. "With love and patience, nothing is impossible." -- Daisaku Ikeda

So maybe one day we will ALL more fully embrace the power of love in our lives, accept fuller responsibility for how we *do* love and how we receive it.

Or maybe we'll continue to prefer to read inspirational love quotes one after another, nod in quick agreement, and move on to the next thing on our to-do list.. .

Steve M Nash

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HOW TO BE A GOOD FRIEND

 HOW TO BE A GOOD FRIEND

Experts prove that having a well-balanced social life can help to uphold a vigorous attitude toward life. This doesn't mean you should be the life of every party, but it indicates developing powerful bonds that help you through the ups and downs of the world. In order to have friends who are great, it is though; you also want to be one. Here are some tips that can help you.

        You need to be there for them as they need you, not when you need something from them. Good friends won't call up people only to ask for a favor. While knowing people that will help you out is vital, it's similarly significant not to abuse the relationship. You need to focus on what your friend is running through at the moment. Are they cheerful? Are they feeling little lonely? Maybe they want to talk about their child going away to school or the fact that they are anxious about their in-laws. Whatever the circumstances, put yourself second and pay attention to what's being said honestly and implied in their discussion.

     You shouldn't wait for friends to call you. Try to make an effort to keep in touch with people. Everybody is busy, but if you need to uphold good friendships you should be practical about communications. It doesn't mean you ought to sit on the phone for three hours a day, but it indicates you send a card, an email or give them a swift call to allow them know you're thinking about them.

       You have to respond to them in a suitable manner. There's nothing more wearisome than sending a friend a note or an email, and having them ignore it because of their business. Every person is busy. If somebody is your friend, you need to make the effort to be kind to them. Responding to their questions is one way you should do that.
      You shouldn't be catty or speak about them behind their backs. It won't be a good idea if you hang out with somebody just so you can go back to somebody else and gossip about your friend. You have to make your decision if you are somebody's friend, or not, and take action accordingly.

     You need to be happy for them. It may sound silly, but some folks just can't be happy at their friend's achievements. You shouldn't be somebody that's only in for complaining about life. If your friend can hit it big - make merry with them. When they need to find love - be cordial and helpful when they get it. There is nothing superior in the world than having friends that support and respect you. FOR MORE LOVE TIPS CLICK HERE

BY Wriddha Hossain

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