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

We put money into a shared account for joint expenses, and she and I keep separate finances for ourselves, like whatever else is left over. I also try to put extra into the joint so we can have a joint savings, for emergencies and what not. My wife has her own personal savings as well, that she's always had.

I recommend just opening a shared account and putting a bit above the bare minimum into it. Keep some "you" cash so you can always buy yourself stuff, and you know, if you're ever buying surprise presents, she doesn't need to know. ;) Other people just join it all, and call it a day.

I only join whatever is a dual-expense, otherwise, its either on her, or on me solely.

It will entirely on you two. In my first marriage, we were both high-earners, everything was joint. We were high enough earners and neither spendthrift, so there weren't any needed discussions on spending/budgeting, and having "private" pockets was just an artifact of us having different banks when we met. Direct deposit to a joint account, retirement maxed out, invested at my direction (because I was more interested). Worked great, but mostly because we had too much to ever need to fight over it.

Second marriage, complete opposite situation, I'm the high-earner, she's a housewife (working on building her business, but let's just say the income disparity is real). Finances are more complicated now since I'm a business owner and the bulk of our pre-marital assets are in my (or my companies) name, but at the end of the day, the card I use to buy things comes out of the same account as her caried rds. I do have more control over the flow from my firm to our joint bank account, but from a "who's money is it" PoV - it's our money, it was all earned since we were together (even though we hadn't married yet); The joint account has enough to cover our next years expenses if something were to happen to me and she needed access to funds before whatever estate settlement happened.

There's no one-size-fits-all approach I can tell you to use. What I can recommend though is that you jointly track all your accounts in some tracking app, and sit down once a quarter to discuss whether you are both on target w/r/t savings, retirement, whatever it is you're earning for. As long as you both are on the same page, then you're fighting together, not with each other. Money becomes tense when people feel entitled to it, or don't understand your situation -- having both of your situations on the same page can help make sure your new toy or their new habit doesn't become grounds for divorce.

All money in joint accounts.

We are always each other's beneficiary.

I make enough that we don't have to think about small-medium purchases too much.

We are frugal in the big areas (e.g. 16yo Honda Civic).

But we do periodic spending temperature checks and as we have gotten older, we have become more mindful of that. Leisure spending over like a hundred or so we always tell each other about it beforehand and try to sleep on it.

I have a spreadsheet where I track weekly account balances + all activity on the main checking account (we rarely pay directly from it, so it's mostly bulk payments for credit cards or bills. Useful for predicting future balances so we can know how much to safely transfer to savings/investments.) On the activity sheet, I annotate each credit card statement with anything "exceptional" or above $250 or so.

We're in a pretty different circumstance so this probably won't be useful, but in our case, my wife has a bank account and I don't. Our belief as fundamentalist Christians is that I as the man have final authority in the family, including over financial matters. I'm also the sole earner, but that wasn't always the case.

We have very little money but it's my sacred duty to always think of how I can care for the family as best as possible, and we've been very comfortable (even when we had basically no money). I've found that when I surrender to God's power, things always turn out for the best. Even in times where it seemed to be a terrible idea, he always had something planned.

Whereas when I stubbornly insist on myself, everything se fracasa bien feo. So I guess my financial strategy is to dissipate my ego and melt into Christ's mind. God is so cool.

Good luck OP, I hope your country's election goes well for you guys!

Joint accounts for everything, both names on cars and house.

We figure if divorce was a concern, we should make it awkward to separate assets we've made over past 20 years together.

It helps that neither of us are bad with money or debt, but we probably wouldn't have married someone like that to begin with.