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Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

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Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#121

Post by jameshush »

For context, as a newly married couple, we spend 80% of our time in Taiwan and 20% in Spain. My job pays the vast majority of our income. I’m Canadian/British, and she’s Taiwanese.

The day after we legally married, I added her as a beneficiary to all my investment and retirement accounts.

In Europe, we keep Euros in one WISE account for which we both have a card.

Culturally, in Taiwan, there isn’t a joint checking account. However, she has the banking password and can transfer money. Banks also let her do whatever she wants with my account as long as she bring my bank stamp.

Also culturally, its important for women to have their own stash of money (私房錢 si fang qian) that’s a psychological safety net. She has that in her own account, it basically just sits there. It’s less then 3% of our net worth and makes her feel safe so I don’t mind.

Every week I take a look at what we spend and make sure we’re on track budget wise in YNAB. We pick our big savings goal together and pool the rest of our money together.

I highly recommend pooling everything together. It makes life a lot more convenient and keeps you both accountable to the goals you’ve set together. If one partner really needs some money saved on the side, that can work (works for us) but all paychecks going forward being pooled makes life simple.

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#122

Post by jjp »

Joint account for everything for the house and family. Both salaries get paid into it, in full. Spend is jointly agreed.

We then both have an individual account for our monthly allowance. Monthly allowance is funded from combined account, and is same amount for us both. Our allowance funds personal items and hobbies.

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#123

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #116
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have considered that. I asked my therapist a few times and she says I'm not a narcissist. I'm not sure what the criteria are. I do experience sympathy (or empathy, which ever is the one where I can feel bad for someone without feeling literal pain), and guilt, and compersion and such, but at times I think I'm more Machiavellian than average. I don't want a relationship where I give and give and realize I've acciden…

Maybe it was just the wording, but your gp post makes it sound like you didn't have any affection for your wife. What was her reaction? I wouldn't call this Machiavellian because Mach. was advising princes to act in opposition to their nature as a necessity for survival in the all out warfare of Italian city states. You however make it seem like you decided to have a layoff to get your household financial metrics in…

I have affection for them. And some of it's my fault for agreeing to things that I hoped I could do, like co-habiting, instead of things that I knew I liked, like living separately.

The motivation is that I'm no longer yelled at by the person I love the most, who I'm supporting financially and emotionally. They were right about some things, my depression got to them, I probably should have left sooner, I probably should not have escalated as far as I did, and I am just kinda having a mid-life crisis and trying to make up for my 20s being boring.

Do you think I did it all for no reason? Do you think people regularly get married despite having no love at all, then divorce for no reason? Maybe it's fair to say I only had a crush, not real love. We should teach kids the difference. Nobody told me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#124

Post by EasyMark »

We put all of our earnings in a joint accounts that require both signatures for any very large withdraw. Off that we pull out “petty cash” type accounts for day to day expenses, hobbies, lunch. Bills/mortgage/etc are paid out of the joint account. We both make good salaries, but mine is roughly 2x hers but we don’t make anything out of that. We sit down together and talk out investments/retirement together and all that is jointly owned of course. We both have some land and “family” money that stays separate from our marital assets but everything after marriage we have shared equally and I consider that fair. It works out pretty well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#125

Post by RajT88 »

Shared checking account and credit cards. We automatically transfer a set amount to it montly and adhoc if it gets low. Many shared expenses draw from this account.

We also have our own accounts and credit cards. We got married late in life (close to 40) and our professional priorities differed greatly. She came to the marriage with 6 figures of school debt and not many assets, where I had 500k in assets already and just 50k in mortgage debt (no other debts).

Our agreement was: I handle paying for our housing while she pays down her debt. After that, we will revisit our financial setup.

Works great for us!

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#126

Post by dusted »

We have a common account, each month we pay the same amount into it, we pay shared expenses (bills, food, etc) from this account. We have separate savings and spending accounts, with an agreement that we each save a certain amount each month. Things we personally want goes out of our private accounts. Things we agree we want goes out of the shared account. This is reasonable, fair and easy for us because our salaries are similar, but I can see how it might not be a comfortable arrangement if there is a big difference.

We both have two cards, one for the shared, one for the private.

If I buy a bunch of snacks, it goes on the private card. If I buy food, the shared.

In the end, I go to work to provide for my family and myself, and I want to be able to buy stupid shit without feeling guilty, I need this to feel things are fair, I'm going to work, I want to reap something from it. I want and need these fixed agreements so that I can save up (on my spending account) for something and buy it without feeling guilty, and know my wife can do the same. (no, decorative pillows are not a shared expense, just like the hifi is not, sure, I move the pillows to get to the couch, and she has to put up with the loud music, but those are not shared expenses, because it's both something the other person would be fine without).

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#127

Post by 2rsf »

PJDK wrote: post #81
jrkatz wrote: post #33

We have a hybrid solution: A joint checking & savings pair (+ credit card) into which paychecks are deposited and against which living expenses (mortgage, food, etc), are drawn; and personal checking & savings accts with monthly transfers from the joint accts. The personal accounts are our 'fun money', and don't get much - they mostly exist to offload the actual bookkeeping of the discretionary spending to the bank,…

We do something very similar. All pay goes into a joint account and all the bills and joint expenses come out of that one. We pay ourselves each an allowance that covers our personal spending. That's basically everything I spend money on by myself, so lunch out, treats, games whatever. I think its a really good way if avoiding any worry about "wasteful" spending. What we each value is different. If we need to tighten…

Can you explain how does "we don't need to fight over what specific spending is or isn't acceptable" works? do you simply cut the personal spending symmetrically?

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#128

Post by 2rsf »

hmcfletch wrote: post #62

Like a bunch of folks are saying, the most important thing is that you are both on the same page regardless of what you choose. As far as all joint accounts vs having individual accounts, I think if has to do with how you view marriage. Is it a single whole, or is it a joined pair of individuals. For me personally, I view my wife and I as single team. Everything is joint (outside of a few super old accounts like othe…

> For me personally, I view my wife and I as single team

We do the same, but I can see how late marriages might influence this decision

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#129

Post by 2rsf »

toast0 wrote: post #87

I didn't see anybody mention this, but one important thing is if you are / will be living in a community property state. If you live in a community property state, and you want to keep things legally separate, that takes a lot of specific effort. I've always lived in community property states, my spouse and I took relatively zero assets into the marriage, and we're on the same page with spending and frugality, so I w…

In many places it is not even possible to register a car on two names, although legally this is more about having a point of contact and less about ownership

Re: Ask HN: How do you structure your shared finances with your spouse/partner

#130

Post by manbitesdog »

cootsnuck wrote: post #70
manbitesdog wrote: post #9

- Both in our early 30s, no kids. - Our salary goes to our individual savings accounts. - A shared checkings account gets topped up to $5000 every month, proportionally to both of our salaries, to optimize for equal purchasing power when buying shared stuff. - We don't really budget anything because we save quite a bit, but we do classify all bank transactions into a few categories and look at a month-by-month matrix…

> - A shared checkings account gets topped up to $5000 every month, proportionally to both of our salaries, to optimize for equal purchasing power when buying shared stuff. I'm assuming this isn't automated, right? Asking because if your bank does somehow allow an automatic transfer based on a target amount in an account that'd be really cool.

Yep, it's automated, but not through the bank. I had to go through the PSD2 and register myself as a payment service provider for my personal account so that they don't charge me.

It's a tedious process but now I don't have to care about this anymore. Although probably the total time required was higher than any time I'll save in the future.

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