Ask HN: How do you and your spouse handle big income differences?

Unless there was a pre-nup and depending on the state they married in, option 1 could mean he gets half of their collective money anyway.

These people should see a councelor and talk about why they think it's important to keep it separate in the first place.

Did you realize that the problem is not money itself? I mean, a therapy would help a lot.

The way my wife and I do it is that I (who make more money) pay the majority of the bills and also handle a lot (but not all) of the long term savings. That leaves us with roughly equal disposable income. Sometimes she asks me for a little extra cash, rarely I ask her to help cover some large sudden expense. If I'm honest, I might spend a little more than she does but she says the same about herself so it's hard to know.

This is just how we organize things though. In reality no matter who's account it's in it's all our money. We face everything in life together and recognize a single interest, you can't enrich one of us without enriching us both. I refer to it as "sharing a life."

Together we make about as much as the OP (with nothing from his wife, so a lot less overall) but I would feel a lot poorer if the two of us were scrapping over who should pay what.

We may be the exception, although it’s only been 13 years so far. Her and I didn’t ever combine our finances other than to open a joint savings account, so it’s never been a discussion of “we need to partition our finances”, it’s just never been a discussion of “we need to collapse our finances into a single pot”.

We do have a significant income disparity (on our taxes I believe it was about 3:1 for me this year), and navigate it mostly by just having an asymmetric set of financial responsibilities. We’re both responsible for our own individual expenses (e.g. cell phone bill, car insurance, credit card debt). She covers the mortgage for our modest house, I cover pretty much everything else (house and cabin insurance, property tax, car insurance for our shared POS construction-hauler van, natural gas, electricity, water/sewer, charitable donations, etc). I know what the mortgage costs, she probably doesn’t know exactly what most of the stuff I pay for costs but I’d be open with her if she was curious.

After all of the expenses are covered, we’re pretty much free to do what we want with what’s left over without consulting with the other person. We’re both also, I guess, sufficiently responsible that it’s a rare situation to run low. We’ve had a few unexpected expenses over the years that left the joint account in a bit of an ugly place but refilled it over the next few months and lived a little lean to make sure the emergency fund was there.

For COVID, her monthly income was reduced to almost zero. We’re in Canada, so she had CERB ($2k monthly). I topped up the joint account and told her she was welcome to take what she needed. She did transfer maybe $1k a few times to cover a few things, but mostly was self sufficient.

I dunno! Maybe it’s not a situation for everyone but it’s been super smooth. When we first started dating and moved in together, I was a grad student with a paltry scholarship, but our expenses were quite low as well. She got by and covered a few more things than I did, and now it’s going the opposite way and there’s no resentment or anything as far as I can tell. We’re both pretty good about sharing when we’re feeling something’s out of balance, so I suspect I’d know about it if she didn’t feel like I was pulling my weight.

First, I'll share my experience.

My wife and I have one bank account, and 2 credit cards each under our name to ensure credit score activity happens. I was a secondary on her credit card for years assuming it was building my credit too, but turns out I wasn't building a credit score at all.

We have one bank account. When we started she was already out of university, and she was the primary income while I went to school, then I graduated and lucked into a high-paying software engineering career, and we had a kid, and she effectively stopped working, only taking small part time jobs.

We've always had one bank account. I was always the big spender, so any disagreements have been about my purchases, especially in my early career when I wasn't making much. Now I make so much money that it's never an issue.

We've been together for nearly 20 years. I know her habits, she knows mine, the only time we have discussions about finances is when one of us inevitably forgets to pay some outstanding bill.

> she was worried that I was taking advantage of the situation

This seems like a reasonable attitude at the beginning, maybe even the first couple years of your marriage. Perhaps this is too harsh, but IMO it's completely inappropriate to feel this way or have concerns like this 12 years in.