Question for the Audience: Couple Finances, Joint or Separate?
Recently, I tied the knot with a beautiful, geeky woman.
So, the question arises: how should we manage our financial lives together? Do we merge our accounts or do we keep them separate? Here are the reasons we see for each.
Reasons to Merge Finances:
- Simpler record keeping
- Forces us to make decisions together
Reasons to Keep Separate:
- Maintain feelings of independence
- If there is a divorce, separation is cleaner
There is also the question of how to handle the joint expenses, like bills. When the rent comes in, how do we divide it? Each pay half the rent? Do we trade bills? Do we each pay proportional to our income? Do we just throw all the income and expenses into the same pot and not worry about it?
So what do you, dear readers, do with your partners? Joint, separate, or some mixture of the two?
Please leave a comment and give us newlyweds your advice.
--
Header photograph by jpockele
Filed in Question for the Audience, couple finances One Response so far
Brian on 19 Feb 2009 at 7:26 pm #
We went with the following strategy and things have worked out great thus far:
One joint checking account where both incomes are direct deposited (I make roughly twice the income as my wife). All household bills are paid from here, such as, rent, utilities, new furniture, car payments, etc.
One joint savings account with automatic transfer from joint checking.
Then we each have our own private checking that we transfer money from joint checking into as a form of allowance. We transfer equal amounts and we pay for all the non-couple type stuff from there, such as, clothes, individual entertainment, meals out during the work week, private credit cards and what not. This works really well because we are able to spend money from our private checking without feeling like we need to explain what we’re spending our money on to each other. It’s in our own private checking, what we do with it is up to us!
Good luck determining how to split your finances. I would suggest not making a decision based on the fact that you may split up one day. Not a really good place to go at the beginning of a marriage.