"Some of the biggest discussions you have when you first get married and throughout your marriage is about money and inevitably somebody is a spender and somebody is a saver. When we first got married Howard was a musician, it was pretty easy for him to go out and buy a clarinet or a saxophone and I would be thinking with the money we were going to do something else with? Or he’d say, “I bought that big screen TV for the house.” We had to have a talk because he was not supposed make decisions like that independent of me. Both of our incomes contributed to the net of our household. So, if one of us wants to buy something that is a significant expenditure that is a discussion point. We also discussed something else. I said I did not want us to be absorbed in each other. We are two individuals, we work well together, but we don’t repeat each other. We both respect what each other is doing. We need time away from each other doing our own things and we need time together. We decided early on to take two trips a year. We took one family trip with the kids and one with just us. So much happens over the course of a year when you have three kids that are very close (in age) together. You spend your life running around getting them involved and engaging them, and it’s easy for you to get lost in them and not have any time for yourself. We made some very good decisions, and we put the issues on the table early so it was no surprise moving forward. It was plain, simple hard work and we did it together."