You've met the love of your life, you're getting married and you're set for life, right? Not so fast.

Many couples forget about the financial implications of marriage and forgo the all-important conversation about money and debt. Yuri Cataldo joined HuffPost Live to share his cautionary tale about the consequences of not discussing debt before getting hitched.

Because he initially had the better credit score and financial profile, he and his wife put all of their purchases in Cataldo's name. They owned a condo in Connecticut, but Cataldo was solely responsible for its mortgage. He also had much of the couple's credit card debt under his name, as well as their student loans.

While he realized that they were amassing significant debt, Cataldo didn't realize how dire the situation was until his wife wanted a divorce.

"Suddenly she was like ... 'This marriage thing is not really working out for me, this is not what I want to do anymore,'" he explained to host Nancy Redd.

Things only got worse from there.

"And then, I lost my job" he continued. "She still had her very high-paying job on Wall Street, so I was then faced with the realization that the debt was all in my name, and I had zero jobs -- I was at the time working for a couple of Broadway shows, which all had closed down because it was right when the economy took a dive, so I was then looking at this giant pile of debt all in my name and just basically feeling [like] I was drowning."

Cataldo's credit score plummeted from the high 700s, when he first met his ex-wife, to the low 500s by the time he got divorced. Faced with mounting financial issues, he moved back home to his parents' home in Indiana.

"When I first moved out to the Midwest, I couldn't get loans for anything because I had no money, terrible credit and a bunch of debt," he said.

Though Cataldo has since rebuilt his credit and dug himself out of his financial hole, his failure to discuss spending habits and debt before getting married proved disastrous.

"[The divorce] allowed her to start fresh, actually, which worked out well for her but at the very end, did not work out so well for me," Cataldo said.