There are just certain financial topics that seem to get a bunch of people riled up. The cost of pets. Whether or not you should prepay your mortgage. Almost anything dealing with what the Bible has to say about money. These are all topics that generate lots of "discussion."
Money and marriage is right up there as well. In Marriage and Money: How to Split Up the Money and Bills, I posted on an article by Michelle Singletary where she advocated joint financial accounts. She said:
When you get married, it is not about you anymore. Mine becomes ours.
"One of the beautiful things about being in a marriage is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One plus one can equal more than two."
You want financial peace in your house? Accept that the day you get married is the day you stop being financially independent.
This, as you can imagine, generated some comments. The first commenter offered an alternative viewpoint:
I can share how we do it...and I think it works quite well.
All of the earnings go in our "master account" – granted my wife stays home with the kids. This account is used to pay all the bills. Each of us has our own account (free checking of course). We each get an allowance every month we can use for whatever purpose we want - no questions asked.
If I get a good bonus - we will sit down and decide together what "bonus" we give ourselves - provided we are on budget elsewhere.
I like the concept of having the individual accounts because:
#1 My wife keeps her check book balanced herself. She does not have to come to me every time she writes a check and makes sure it is written down. If she had to do this, she would feel like I was keeping up with what she is spending it on.
#2 The money is less likely to get spent on things like kid items or other things covered in the budget elsewhere. I really have to push my wife into spending on herself sometimes – hey – she deserves it!
#3 It allows her to save her money up month after month if she wants to buy something big. She has complete control of the balance and doesn’t have to ask me how much she can spend.
I hear many couples talk about how they each pay certain bills – and after that they can spend the rest how they want. Hey – you earned it, you should spend it the way you want, right? Well – that sure doesn’t sound like a JOINT marriage to me.
Here's someone in favor of joint accounts:
The separate thing would have never worked for us. We now use an envelope system. We each have an amount for clothing and allowance and can be spent as we please. Other than that, we have a single checking account for the bills and anybody in the family has access to the envelopes (the kids have their own envelope systems). This system has probably produced more financial peace between my wife and I than paying off debt or anything. The only "nagging" about spending is an occasional reminder to the kids that if they spend all their clothing/makeup budget on entertainment, we will not bail them out and buy them clothes. It's been working for two years now and the money stuff gets easier all the time.
I agree with Terry on the "joint marriage" issue, but I have friends for whom that very system has worked for many years. Whatever floats their boat. It's just not the way I want to conduct my joint marriage.
The next commenter didn't really appreciate Singletary's thoughts:
My wife and I have been married for thirteen years, and together for eighteen. We've never had a joint account. (That is until we bought out current house two years ago -- we now have a joint emergency account for the house. It's an old house, and has many problems, and this works well.)
This quote, in particular, really bugs me:
You want financial peace in your house? Accept that the day you get married is the day you stop being financially independent.
Singletary is implying that you can't have a successful marriage if you choose to keep separate finances. This is ignorant and dogmatic.
Though my wife and I keep our finances separate, we've never had a problem with money. We've never had a fight about money. Neither of us resents this situation. It makes perfect sense to us. I buy my stuff, she buys her stuff, and we split the cost on joint stuff. It's just as much a "joint marriage" as those with shared finances.
With many financial decisions, there's no right way or wrong way to do things. There are options, and your job is to pick the one that makes the most sense to you.
And here's the final word:
I think the bottom line is that everybody's different, and every relationship is different. What works for some people doesn't work for others. My partner and I have some combined resources and some separate resources. We do occasionally squabble about money, but I think we would anyway even if everything was 100% combined or 100% separate.
This question of whether money in marriages and LTRs should be combined or not seems to come up in the PF blog world once a month or so. There's always somebody (who has combined finances with their spouse) who implies that it's not a true marriage or a true partnership unless you share everything. That may be true for some people. Some people may not feel totally committed or "joined" unless all their eggs are in the same basket. Well, bully for them, but why they think their way works for everybody I just don't know.
Personally, we use joint accounts and manage our money as one. But I have no problem with people who do it separately. Every relationship IS different, and as long as you can communicate about money, manage it effectively as a team, and follow the basic financial principles that can make you well-off, you'll be fine no matter how your accounts are set up. That is until one of you racks up $30,000 in credit card debt and the other doesn't know about it. ;-)
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