Is either partner coming in with significantly more wealth or significantly more debt? If so, is that information fully known between you? How do you each feel about that? Some couples are cool with helping one another pay off debt others would prefer not to commingle finances in that situation.ĭo you want the same things? If one of you plans to stop working at 30 to start a peach stand on the side of the road and the other wants to be a corporate attorney until they’re 65, it’s probably good to share that information upfront. I’d say these are the general questions you want to consider: Questions to ask yourself when deciding whether to combine finances It was a relatively easy conversation, then, when we were determining whether or not we should combine. Neither one of us has a spending issue, neither one of us has any debt, and we both came into the marriage with (coincidentally) near-equal assets. Retire from traditional work as millionaires in our early 30s and figure it out (when we set that goal, we had no idea how we were going to do it yet, but we knew that’s what we wanted). The frustration of having to maintain creative accounting for seemingly no reason is what pushed us to make the decision: Are we financially aligned, or not?įortunately, we had a lot of conversations well before we were engaged about our goals. If everything I own is now his and vice versa, then who cares who paid for groceries and who paid the electric bill? It’s all “ours” anyway. Keeping track of who paid for what and sending Venmo requests back and forth felt like we were just shuffling the same money back and forth in an obnoxious game of Monopoly, because – we both acknowledged – we consider our assets shared now. It just reflects the reality of how we both felt after saying, “I do.”)īefore long, the inertia that kept us splitting things and maintaining separate systems started to cause more annoyance than seamlessness. (That’s not a recommendation, so please don’t take it as such. What’s the point of adding an intermediary step where we both put money in the same account if we’re just putting in our respective halves of the costs we’re already splitting?Īfter we legally tied ourselves together, the idea of trying to keep things separate just didn’t seem as important. That sounded good in theory pre-marriage, but after legally binding ourselves together until death, we felt that – for us – it just felt like a more complicated version of the “roommates who split everything” plan we were currently enacting. We went back and forth for a while (pre-marriage) about what type of system would make the most sense for us: Initially, we thought a “yours, mine, and ours” play might work, wherein we’d both contribute some money to the metaphoric pot for joint expenses but then hang onto the rest of our income individually. It didn’t help that we had lived together for about a year before getting married: We had the “roommates splitting expenses” thing down, making it even easier to carry on with the status quo post-nuptials. He had a system that worked for him, and I had a system that worked for me. My husband and I are 28 and 26, respectively, and we’ve both been managing our own money for several years. How come you two haven’t combined finances yet?Īnd while I wish I had a juicier, more sinister answer for you, the truth is: Inertia. Is this just for you, or for you and your husband? Every time I post one of my monthly budget breakdowns, I inevitably get the same question:
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