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Money is shuttled back and forth between separate bank accounts as needed.
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 other have mentioned). My income is our income. Her income is our income. The fact that I make more is irrelevant to our spending habits.
To me, having separate individual accounts, feels like you aren't committing fully to marriage and are keeping your money yours "just in case." If you are already feeling like you need a "just in case," why are you get married to begin with. I feel like separate accounts based on the income disparity would most likely lead to feelings of imbalance and resentment down the line.
I am sure there are a huge number of my biases implicit here, and there are plenty of reasonable conversations to have either way. People obviously make it work in all types of ways, so like I (and many others here have) mentioned getting on the same page is really the core of it.
Different things work for different people. I've known other couples who put most of their income into a joint account, but each person is given a monthly "allowance" that's auto-transferred to individual accounts. That lets each person have some discretionary money that's just theirs, and it can be saved or spent as they see fit.
The remaining amount in the daily account is used for bills, groceries, and such. We also have a budget in here for various social things like dinners out and such as we do a lot of these together.
We then have an individual checking account which we both take an equal monthly allowance for discretionary spending. This is also how we buy gifts for each other for birthdays and Christmas.
We split bills though. I take large expenses, like rent and insurance and they take smaller expenses like groceries and dining out. At the start of the year we do a budget of what we project expenses to be based on the prior year (usually takes an hour or so because we both keep good financial records). We then divide that down into a monthly payment such that we're each contributing 50% of our living expenses and they transfer money to me monthly since I'm paying the larger share of the bills. At the end of the year when we budget for the next year we reconcile any differences between budget and reality so that we do in-fact each pay 50% of the living expenses (sometimes this means I give them money, sometimes they give me money). For really large one-off expenses we nominate a partner to take on that expense and the other transfers their share of the money for that expense to the partner taking on the expense. Same story for vacations or trips except we settle that after the fact not before.
It's basically made money a non-issue in our relationship. Their money is theirs and my money is mine, what we chose to do with it is up to us so long as we're contributing our fair share of the living expenses.
Edit: since others are saying this, our relationship is very close and we consider ourselves to be a team but we very explicitly decided when forming our relationship to not have combined finances even though we cohabitate because we had observed that to be a deep point of contention in relationships around us.
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…
For myself we have joint everything, and then purchases over a certain threshold we need each others permission.
I'm no longer married but this is how we handled it. Both have a personal account and a shared account for common and family things. Mortgage was shared and so was every other family expense like food and travel. I made twice what she did so I put 66% of the money in the joint account. So long as we had enough money in there for our budget we could do with our leftover money as we pleased.
My late wife and I each had our own accounts, plus a third account for mortgage, utilities, groceries, etc. We'd each deposit into the third account, and kept the rest of our finances separate. I made more money, so I'd usually pay when we went out to eat or whatever, but it wasn't an obligation.
It worked pretty well -- unlike most of my married friends, I don't recall us ever having an argument about money.
Combining your finances completely is as simple as you get. Money goes in pot, money comes out of pot. No separation.
But anything that gets to be a significant amount becomes a discussion. Things are no longer simple.
A joint account for joint expenses and personal accounts for personal expenses is also "simple". But how much does each person contribute? Are the personal accounts unquestioned?
The thing here is that there is no "simple". You're dealing with people, people are inherently complex. You know you. You know your fiance. Make a plan that accounts for those two people and all of their peculiarities.
It could be that it would be best for you to have 10 accounts. A house account, a grocery account, a clothes account, etc. because you need to be aware of how much you spend on food and what not. I don't know. You're going to get a lot of answers here and some of them may help guide you, but make sure any plan you come up involves your fiance and they are completely on board.
We have occasionally talked about having more joint finances, but we've been doing like this for 20 years now, and for us it is by far the simplest solution.
- 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…
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.