We found love and a money M ESS.

Ron Habin, 55, and his wife, Annette, 54, of Orlando, had to solve a slew of financial problems when they married.

Annette: I'm from New York City. In the late 1980s I was a film and television production coordinator and moved to Florida for a job with Universal Studios in Orlando. I started a New York singles club here to get some of that New York energy. When I met Ron, I disbanded the club!

We married in our forties, and it was the first marriage for both of us. Consolidating your finances in your forties would be quite a challenge on its own. but we had special problems.

Ron: We both brought financial issues that neither of us knew how to deal with. I'm an anthropologist with my own practice. The closest I came to business training is when I got my bachelor's degree from American University--they had a business college there, but I didn't know where to find it. I knew nothing. But during the illness and the ultimate death of my dad, his finances were turned over to me.

There were more accounts around than I had ever dreamed of. Every day I was getting envelopes with three or four statements apiece. For a year and a half, this consumed me. My dad had made several friends in the financial business, so he had brokers all over the country, and they seemed to be working at cross-purposes.

Annette: I also had a number of accounts, including IRAs and various pension accounts from jobs, and a broker and an insurance agent who sold me annuities. One thing that bothered me was the incredible amount of churning. It seemed like buy and sell and buy and sell all the time. Who knew if that was in our best interest?

Ron: One time on a Friday at 4:55 P.M. I got a phone message from a broker about a company that had a lot of bad news and its stock price was depressed. The broker bought 10,000 shares. It was Enron. If the company was in the headlines, we owned it. One broker in LA. had accounts for both my father and mother, and each had sworn the broker to secrecy. So my mother bought things my dad didn't know about, and my dad bought things my mother didn't know about.

Annette: What finally caused us to change this situation was a chance meeting with a financial planner, Susan Spraker. She asked us to bring all our financial statements--IRAs, investment accounts, savings accounts and tax returns. She was appalled.

She had us fill out an annual-expense chart to see what we were spending. We did a questionnaire to figure out our risk tolerance, so she could match our investments to our comfort level as well as to our goals.

Susan handled the consolidation of all our accounts and told us what forms we needed to make the transfers, so it was easy. When it came to ending a relationship with a broker, she made the call with us in the office. That was a big help to me. Our investments were consolidated in a single account with Schwab, and now we're well diversified in stocks, bonds, real estate and cash. We just got our six-month statement--just one stack of papers. What a relief.

Ron: It's also been important in the sense that I got my daily life back. I want to do what I want to do with my life.

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As told to Robert Frick; PHOTOGRAPH BY Eric Larson