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

Same here, and pretty much the same as I've always done with partners.

One account for me, one account for them, and one shared account from which "shared" bills come from - be it rent or mortgage, electricity, food, etc.

Sometimes a person will say "I drove you to the countryside will you give me money?" or I'll say "I bought us tickets for a gig, you wanna pay me back, or you wanna buy me beer all night?" So sometimes there is some play back and forth about expenses/costs, but typically we transfer just enough to the shared account to cover the expected outgoings each month.

Our finances are quite simple at this point. We both work but my income is higher than hers. We each maintain our own accounts and credit cards and generally pay for our own personal purchases. For shared things, we either split them proportionately or 50/50 and one of us pays the bill and the other uses Cash App to reimburse for their portion. (We're also new at this, having been married less than a year and our strategy may change in the future.)

We have a joint checking account. I automatically draw our investments to our joint Fidelity account.

I try to keep a balance of $50k in our checking account (it's a minimum that our bank sets to give us perks and a free safety deposit box). At the end of the month, if we over that, my partner knows that we can splurge on dining, vacations, or other stuff. If we are under that, we tighten our spending for a bit until we are back over it.

I tried all sorts of budgeting and tracking ideas, but most just weren't worth the effort.

Two young professionals, no kids.

We each have our own bank account(s) and credit cards and our own budget in YNAB. I manage both budgets but only do hers when she’s present.

We agreed on what constitutes a shared expense ahead of time (mortgage, utilities, etc) and split them based on what percentage of last month’s household income (post-tax) each of us earned. This is variable since we both do some contracting/consulting outside of our day jobs.

For going out, vacations, shared groceries, etc., we just split things as we go. We have a joint savings account that we put the same amount of money in each month and use for travel etc.

A friend and his girlfriend have a joint credit card that they put all shared expenses on and split at the end of each month, but managing that in YNAB is not the smoothest so we haven’t done that yet. Might write some software to make it easier.

It's not super simple, but here's how we did it for a long time:

All of your income that's not invested for retirement goes to a joint account, every 1st of the month. From that joint account, you then move the money to many different accounts and/or prepaid credit cards: - Day to day expenses, like groceries. - "Irregularities": municipal taxes, school taxes, things that don't happen every month, like car inspection, veterinary, vacation expenses. You add everything in a spreadsheet that you keep, and divide by 12. Add some padding. - Home improvements, aka "IKEA" account. Fixed amount every month. If it's a good that you buy to add you our home (coffee machine, chair, curtain, etc.), that's the account. If it's a consumable (gas for the car), use "day to day expenses". - Individual accounts: each one of you have an account that you decide what to do with. Buying clothes, hobby, etc. aka "I'm an adult, I do what I want". - Kids: There's always something to buy. Clothes, etc. - Automatic payments are taken from the main joint account, but you could also have another account if it makes it easier.

This method can get confusing and you may need to move money from one account to another one when the wrong card was used. But the main advantage is that it automatically budgets for you. You see the amount remaining for the month for everything. Otherwise, you may think that you still have plenty of money to spend on the grocery, so you buy a nice coffee machine, and then the mortgage and car payments happen and you're left with nothing for the rest of the month to do the grocery.

The main goals we had when using this method were to never use a credit card (and lose track of how much money we have), and also accommodate for the discrepancy in our revenues at the time.