Comments on: Love & Marriage – On Combining Our Finances.

By: Carnival Of Personal Finance #100 - Happy Anniversary Edition. | My Two Dollars

Tue, 15 May 2007 05:14:56 +0000

[...] lot of work, and my thanks goes out to My Open Wallet for doing such a great job this week. My post Love & Marriage – On Combining Our Finances was lucky enough to be included in this giant [...]

By: david

david — Sat, 05 May 2007 15:06:17 +0000

Well that certainly brought out a lot of comments! Thanks everyone for letting us in on your sharing thoughts, I appreciate it. Seems most people that left comments are at least not hiding thousands in debt from each other, which is great!

By: Gal Josefsberg

Gal Josefsberg — Fri, 04 May 2007 22:50:30 +0000

This is one issue my fiance and I are discussing now. I can’t tell you what we’re going to decide but I can definitely tell you that communication is key. Make sure both sides understand each other’s goals, fears, history and habits. It makes reaching a decision much easier and it prevents either side from getting hurt by not understanding something.

GJ
http://www.60in3.com

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:46:53 +0000

My wife and I lived together for 1.5 years before we got married. Prior to getting married, we kept our finances separate and we each paid roughly 50% of the bills. At the end of the month, we’d “settle up” for any large differences. As the wedding day came up, we decided that settling up was getting to be stupid, so we set up a joint checking account where we put our direct deposits and where we paid bills from.

We still keep separate accounts from when we were both single. We were both fortunate enough to have some assets prior to marriage and for those accounts, we still keep our individual names from those investments.

We’ve been married for 6 months now and we’re starting to establish some “married” assets together. We hold onto our old accounts as legacy items and all current savings only go towards our married accounts.

By: Sharing money works for our marriage at Clever Dude Personal Finance & Money

Sharing money works for our marriage at Clever Dude Personal Finance & Money — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:45:46 +0000

[...] a very similar marriage, at least with regards to finance, as we do. He wrote a short article about how sharing finances when they got married worked for [...]

By: martha in mobile

martha in mobile — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:27:29 +0000

Our finances are mingled, although I maintain credit in my own name. We make the same amount of money. I handle all the finances because my husband would rather not think about “all that stuff.” He checks with me when he wants to spend what he considers to be an uncomfortable amount of money (currently around $150), and he doesn’t spend very much or very often. Neither do I. I monitor our main credit card, checking account, and investment accounts so I know where we stand at any given moment. It works because we are fairly similar in our spending habits and trust each other. Actually, his trust keeps my spending in check — I would probably spend more if I had to ask him if it was okay.

By: bree

bree — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:25:13 +0000

My husband and I have had a combined chequing account since we moved in together, before we got engaged. We have kept our investments and most other accounts in our individual names, but that’s just because we’re lazy – in practice when we allocate funds all money is ‘our’ money, including debts.

Before we got married, the chequing account was really the only area where our finances merged, and it was primarily to pay bills. We had set up individual chequing accounts too with the intention of putting aside personal play money each month, but we found that we didn’t need it. When we got married, we took a realistic stock of our finances, including our significant debts. I had a lot of credit card debt, and he has a lot of student loan debt. We made a plan to tackle it together, and we’ve stopped thinking about the accounts as ‘his’ or ‘mine’ because it benefits both of us to pay down those high-interest loans and get our finances in order.

All in all, it’s worked out really well to combine our finances. It’s encouraged us to communicate honestly and openly about what we spend, what we make and what we owe, and we know there are no surprise accounts that could trouble us later on. It helps that we have similar spending patterns, and we don’t nag each other about occasional small-scale splurges. Because we are on the same page in managing our money, we know that neither of us will come home with a big impulse purchase that will blow the budget.

By: jo-less

jo-less — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:23:58 +0000

Hi, we have a totally different approach. My GF and I have one joint account which we refer to as the ‘house’ account into which we put an equal amount every month. it pays for bills occasionally, but mostly things we can’t justify ourselves – holidays, bits of art etc. Or if we are feeling poor, sometimes the ‘house’ takes us both out for dinner Other than that, we have our own, separate, current accounts, savings, pensions etc. We loan stuff backwards and forwards and whatever, but generally we just do our own thing. My gf has FAR more income than I do, so this way I get to budget myself and she deals with her complicated tax issues and so on. Works for us! Maybe we’d consider combining if we got a Civil Partnership, but I don’t know how all the legalities work after that (we’re in the UK). I think there would be some tax benefits though.

By: arcyz

arcyz — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:33:47 +0000

We’ve combined finances as soon as we got married 7 years ago. It’s been great. We are fairly similar in our spending habits — mostly frugal, but willing to spend more on something high quality. I have read reports that say people are attracted to people of opposite spending habits, but my husband and I both think it would be impossible for either of us to live with someone who is a big spender and be happy.

We are both believers in living frugally and retiring early. We don’t even have a $100 mark for needing approval from the other person. On the other hand, we always inform each other of all major purchases, but neither of us has opposed any purchase by the other person. I definitely think being open and above-board is the key in combining finances and keeping the structure loose. Plus, I think it goes a long way towards the health of the marriage, not only financially, but also trust-wise.

By: Cheeseburger

Cheeseburger — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:01:04 +0000

MY fiance and myself recently amalgamated our funds together. I was against it at first because I didn’t really see any benefit over just dividing bills and getting them paid. Her arguments were that it would help solidify the relationship and it would be a good way to do things together as it would be “our money” not mine and hers. I hate to admit when I am wrong, but its worked out quite nicely as we have good discussions with how we want to spend our money and what to set up for the future.