Online premarital course

I'm curious, does a premarital course differ from premarital counseling? I've never heard of premarital courses outside of a religious setting before, hence the question. If what you're looking for is more premarital counseling, any licensed marriage and family therapist would be an appropriate resource.

@mrsatwood I really have no idea. In FL though if you take a premarital course your marriage license is cheaper (not why we're doing it). I'll start looking into a therapist instead though and see what I find. I'm mainly looking for advice/counseling about household finances since you always read that money causes most fights. ETA: I got the term course from the FL state website

Premarital counseling will provide that. Our first session went over things like are you going to share bank accounts, who pays the bills, how much will you save, what's your plan for budgeting, expectations for retirement savings, etc etc etc. It brought up some things we didn't think of as well as things we assumed the other person thought as well but turns out we had different ideas. I'm not sure what FL requires but a LMFT could also provide a certificate of completion if you find out it would be sufficient. Good luck!

Ah @mrsatwood thank you! I really didn't want to go the online route

FH are doing premarital counseling through the Prepare Enrich program. Online there is a list of facilitators that are certified in the program in your area.

Many were affiliated with churches, but there were also therapists that were on the list.

We met with the therapist, talked about the basics, then took an online assessment that compared our answers. The assessment helps the facilitator determine the most important things we need to discuss and saves time by not talking about the less important stuff that aren't issues. Also, I agree with MrsSasswood2016, it has brought up thing that we didn't think about on our own.

Very helpful!

I don't think it was much of a price difference to do the premarital counseling... in the end, it wasn't worth the extra fees of the counseling for us.

You can go to a licensed therapist for premarital counseling, but insurance won't cover it and it'll likely be around $150 or higher per session or at least that's the case in TN.

Thanks! I wasn't sure if it was something insurance would cover or not.

Check this out. http://conscious-transitions.com/premarital-e-course/

I didn't take this particular course but took another and I think very highly of Sheryl's work.

We had to do our marriage prep online because our diocese is so small; our priest directed us to catholicmarriagepreponline.com. We didn't particularly like it, as it is very much aimed at people who aren't practicing their faith or don't know much about the theology of marriage. As such, the material and questions were very basic and nothing was new to us. Some of the questions were also rather vague, and the "feedback" we got felt like it was just copy and pasted. We actually started to get a bit snarky with our answers, at which point our mentor couple emailed our priest a thank you email for sending us their way and gave him 10% off the next couple he recommended. Go figure!

Pros: work at your own pace, flexible (you have three months to complete it)

Cons: no opportunity to go deeper into topics you would like to, no personal connection to your mentors