91–100 of 146 posts
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…
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…
That is absolutely fascinating, how does it work that your wife has a bank account, but you don't... or do you just not have access? In Denmark you cannot avoid having a bank account, you must have at least one. Also if you have final authority over financial matters, how does it work out if only your wife have a bank account? I hope it doesn't sound judgemental, it is by no means meant that way, I am just incredibly…
That seemed clear enough, from what he said.
Were you asking the details on that? If so, I'd be mildly interested as well.
I have terrible finances compared to her. I make more money on an hourly basis, but I'm not working full time right now, and I've always been quite financially irresponsible. She makes a little less per hour but has been super consistent with her job for decades and is very good at controlling her spending. She's the very epitome of "slow and steady wins the race", while I have spurts of high income followed by months of poverty.
How we split it all:
To protect her from my poor management, we have separate finances (accounts), but we split the rent and household bills evenly. I end up prepaying for most of it upfront, we use a spreadsheet to calculate what she owes, and she Venmos me her half at the start of every month.
For fun spending money, we both deposit the same amount into a joint account every month (we use Zeta, a virtual bank, which replaces what Simple used to offer). We both have a debit card that can charge to it directly, and we use it for joint outings, dinners, and other fun stuff. Sometimes I eat a bit more, sometimes she does, whatever, neither of us are worried about that.
And for less predictable shared expenses (groceries, pet vet visits, etc.), we have a separate credit card for that purpose only. We pay it off in full every month.
This three-way system has worked very well for us for 3+ years. The essentials are always taken care of first (via my automatic payments and her paying me half). We have a set entertainment budget every month. Then the joint credit card is only for our unexpected/unpredictable spending on top of that, which isn't very much (few hundred dollars a month).
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…
Your point is a good one, and I agree with your overall thrust; but if you'll permit a deeply nerdy analogy, we can model this as a concurrency problem. Is it better for two threads of a single process to manage access to shared resources via mutexes and shared memory, or by message-passing between separate arenas? Naturally, we have to say that "it depends".
Most of your wealth should be in offshore accounts or buried in places that neither friends, family, the government and least of all your spouse knows anything about or can touch. That's called sleeping easy at night. If anybody starts to nose about your money, it's time to start becoming very suspicious. As for how to split expenses, that's according to your personal preference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. And even if that's not true, keeping track of everything separately just seems so... exhausting. Like, you pay the electricity, I'll pay the water bill, you pay 75% of the mort…
> Like, you pay the electricity, I'll pay the water bill, you pay 75% of the mortgage, I'll pay 80% of our vacation, but we split meals 50/50... Sure, it can be exhausting to keep track of everything separately and constantly re-calculate shared bills each month. But it doesn't have to be split like that. Here's a few examples I've seen that seem to work well. Example #1: (a married couple, with equivalent incomes) A…
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…
I imagine you have gotten this advice before, but IMO a high yield savings probably makes sense. Say keep 10k in checking for bills, and then the other 40k in high yield. It will more than easily pay for the safe deposit box! For myself we have joint everything, and then purchases over a certain threshold we need each others permission.
Married, 4 kids, she’s stay at home mom. Joint checking, savings, investments, home ownership, cars, everything. I do most of the account management and planning because she hates doing it. We have no concept of fairness in spending. If she wants something truly expensive we talk about it and how it fits in our budget. I do likewise, but in general we both kinda know what the boundaries are, and there’s zero score ke…
Plenty of people are "fine with it" until the court awards spousal support on the basis of lifestyle acclimation rather than needs.
50% divorce rate, 75% of which is initiated by the wife, and don't require you to have done anything wrong. Effectively, you're playing roulette and you've staked your entire financial future on Red. I really hope it works out for you.