My husband and I did our Values Circles last night from the David Bach book, “Smart Couples Finish Rich.” Here’s what each of us identified as our top 5:

Me: Family, Career, Friends, Fun, Helping People.

Husband: Family/Love/Marriage, Creativity/Career, Joy, Security, Friends.

The idea is that who you are or who you want to be in turn drives what you do and what you have (which influences how you earn, spend, and save money).

Be, Do, Have.

(I was happy to realize as I dug back into his book last night that it has good insights and advice despite some of the silly-ish jargon.)

You can list more than five values, and certainly more than five are important to each of us — health, for example. I’m sure we may reconsider these as we go along — the point is to pick five that you want to focus on most for one year of your financial plan.

We also took the financial knowledge quiz (T/F) with questions like, “I know our current net worth,” retirement, savings, investments, insurance, etc. Total: 18 points.

This is something of a set-up, because we know where all this stuff is and that we could look it up. But it’s still a valuable barometer of where we actually are.

My score: 6. “You need to learn how to work together in order to protect yourselves from future financial disaster.” Sheesh! All right, already, I bought the book, didn’t I!

Husband: 13. “The two of you are not totally in the dark, but there are some areas in which your knowledge is less than adequate.”

A motto for the ages.

The next steps should be more fun. As Bach says, in the brainstorming sessions of his group classes, it takes people much longer to actually think through and list their values than to shout out goals or things they want to buy. (He timed them: 10 minutes to list 30 goals, and about one minute to list 30 of the other things.)

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