Before getting married and becoming a parent, Kiersten Saunders says the best way to describe her early relationship with money was "misplaced abundance." "I felt like there was a ton of money in the world, and I just needed grab my piece of it," she says. "So I focused a lot on earning."
The problem was that she was spending at a rate that was twice as much as what she was earning. Saunders spent her 20s thinking that making money was easier than managing it, so she racked up consumer debt and was living paycheck to paycheck. When she met her husband, Julian, in 2012, shortly before she turned 30, she was dealing with maxed out credit cards. Julian was the complete opposite when it came to money. "He was already very fiscally responsible," says Saunders.