Managing money with your spouse or long-term partner
There are a number of ways to merge money, and a number of degrees of merging from ‘What’s mine is mine’ to ‘we share everything’. Whatever you do when you make a long-term commitment to your partner (poly people, as usual, might have more factors involved), you’ve got to do something, and it must work for you. The number one thing couples fight about is money ‘“ and it doesn’t matter if you’re as straight as an arrow or as queer as a three-dollar bill, the chances are that you and your partner will not have the exact same attitudes about money. The only way to make this work is to talk about it. In order to talk about, you have to know what your hang-ups and what your goals are, and you need to get your partner to think about theirs, too.
My hang up? I’m impossibly cheap at times. My parents raised me to be aware of money, but I have been known to take their lessons too far. I’m not ‘screw my friends into buying me drinks’ cheap, not ‘bad tipper’ cheap, more like ‘never use an atm that will charge a fee’ cheap or ‘ride my bike to the box office to avoid the Ticketmaster’ charge cheap. My thrifty predisposition flows over into many decisions in my everyday life. I couldn’t share everything. There was just no why I could smile through an announcement like “Look at these jeans I got on sale for $75!”.
My wife’s hang-ups? Opposites attract, and savers usually fall in love with spenders, right? Brittany’s proclivity to buy nice things that last sometimes gets the better of her and she buys nice things that aren’t really any nicer than the cheap ones. She used to overdraw her account a few times a year, and has always been really generous.
The generosity is endearing, and her style is fabulous but it sometimes contributed to the over-drafts. There was just no way she was passing over Diesel or Urban Outfitters to buy jeans at Target .
We have both learned from each other over the last few years and now both sit comfortably on the middle line between spendthrift and sparing. These situations are difficult enough when two people are in the same income bracket, but there was one further complication; my wife is a graduate student, so she earns about 25% of what I earn. Clearly we weren’t going to op for an even split down the middle or I’d be sipping fair trade $15 per pound coffee while she drank warm water flavored with instant Folgers. Here is how we decided to share money to accommodate both of our spending styles.
We totaled up all of our expenses, down to renting movies and taking an occasional cab home on a cold Saturday night. We subtracted this from our combined income, and divided the remaining amount in half. That half is ours to spend on whatever we want; lattes, clothes, bikes, drinks with friends etc. There are some gray areas between what we pay for individually and what our joint account pays for, and we’re working that out. This way, it doesn’t matter to me if my wife blows her whole amount on new gear for her latest cycling endeavor, or if she chips away at it slowly on beers with friends. Our short-term savings helps for thinks like plane tickets to visit friends and cousins’ baby shower gifts.
It turns out we share more than most people our age (according to polling my friends), but I think the income disparity is at play there. No matter how much sharing is involved I have found that talking about money is key to success. What do you think? I look forward to reading your comments below.
My partner and I have been together for over 15 years. We kept separate finances for a couple of years, but when it was clear that we were in it for the long haul, we combined finances. We don’t argue much any more, but we do talk about finances on a fairly regular basis.
We also have a threshold where we discuss purchases over a certain amount, but under that amount, we pretty much leave each other alone. We’re also careful about saving for the future, because we’re not confident that the gay penalty will ever go away.
to me, it just seems weird to share money … how do you buy nice things for each other and have it mean something if you’re just drawing from the same pot of money? you don’t merge personalities just bc you become a couple … why merge bank accounts? I make less than my partner, but still wouldn’t want to share the same checkbook.
Your agreement sounds like a good one, all the more so if it is working well for you two.
We do 50% into our own savings/investments, and 50% into the joint checking account. We have to both put money in a joint pot, because otherwise, I’m carrying an uneven share, since I’m the only one who will get either of us clothes, shoes, and groceries.
We haven’t tackled how to deal with income disparity yet, really, since we started out with comparable incomes. Hm.
I guess we’ll have to talk about it, then.
We started out with a very definite system that appealled greatly to my spreadsheet-y side that was similar in some ways: we had a joint account, figured out our monthly expenses, then contributed in the accounts based on our ratio of income. I was making more, so had more free $, but he was a grad student, and had more free $ than he’d had previously when he was living with other grad students.
We went to even contributions when I switched jobs, and when we moved, we got one joint account into which all $ goes. As for gifts, the point of them very clearly becomes about the thoughtfulness and desire to treat your partner well, rather than anything else. If we did big gifts, this might have been more of an issue, but we’re somewhat equally cheap, so many of these changes were smoothed out. Plus, there was always lots of talking.