We pretty much do this, although it's a little subject to the same thing that "unlimited PTO" is - one person may feel guiltier about spending money than the other and it may crop up in various ways.

The only thing we haven't quite figured out how to account for yet is that we are occupying pretty 'conventional' roles by choice and by practicality. I can make a lot more money for many reasons, most of them have nothing to do with me, and they certainly don't have /anything/ to do with me working harder or being more valuable than my wife. It is what it is, and we mostly are okay with it.

However, because a ton of my wife's work is still unseen and undervalued (by society, and sometimes by me) and even though we have both agreed that she shouldn't work a low paying job she hates just for the sake of working, and even though we both see that much of her labor is in the traditionally feminine realm of home-making, emotional support, maintaining social connections, etc (which are all very valuable! They make my life immeasurably better! I couldn't afford to pay for them at market rates!)

So our arrangement works well for us if we stay married of course, yet if we don't, I am arguably in a much stronger position of being able to make money, still have an intact work history, etc etc. Yes historically this is where alimony comes in, but it is still hard to grapple with. You never want to think about your relationship ending, yet you also want to work together to make sure that the choices that you have both made that work best for you while you are together don't become something far worse in retrospect if you choose to part.

I think this skips the biggest source of tension in my household with regards to money. The only way I know to describe that is 'it's worth less to you than to me'.

For instance, I would tomorrow gladly outsource the entirety of our laundry work to a service. It would be much cheaper than other monthly expenses we have that I value much less highly. But my wife has shot that down. She has all manner of reasons why its not a good idea and none of them are related to the bare economics of the problem.

As academic economics has found, so does my family, the models need to be sensitive to lots of data that is not captured in price to make reasoning about these things workable.

The flows are the easy part, the stocks are much harder.

1 partner enters the marriage with a $500K paid off house, the other enters with nothing. They divorce 20 years later and the house is appraised at $2.5M, should:

A: partner 1 receive $2.5M, partner 2 receive $0?

B: partner 1 receive $1.25M, partner 2 receive $1.25M?

C: partner 1 receive $1.5M, partner 2 receive $1M? D: other?

How does this answer change if the house can be sold vs can’t be sold? How does this answer change if partner 1 comes into the marriage with a partially paid off mortgage and both contribute to mortgage payments afterwards? How does it change if the house is underwater instead?

The problem is all of the above models are legitimate models of how to split ownership, but they’re incompatible views. So you need to reach alignment at the start of the relationship over which model to use, otherwise what could have been an amicable parting ends in bitter recrimination.

This is what my SO and me have been doing for 8 ish years now and it's great. We call it "pocket money". I can't complain when she spends it all on shoes and bags, she can't complain when I spend it all on beer and hamburgers.

When we were poor, we both only got a little pocket money each month. Now that we're richer, we both get more. I buy hotel breakfasts now sometimes (the buffet ones), on normal work days, in my home town. It's terribly decadent but hey, it's my money. Other people buy iPhones. I have nobody to answer to but me. It's lovely.

I warmly recommend pocket money.

My wife and I do the share model. However money is a very emotional thing.

The only thing I’m strict about is big picture. IE, Do we have enough savings? Are we on track of retirement?

If I focused on keeping a fun money budget things would get stressful. IE is her hair, nails from fun money? When I take the kids to laser quest is that my fun money? Did we really need new placemats? Should that be fun money?

When there are no kids and both work full time it’s simple enough I guess. But when you are a parents it just gets too complicated.

We've had separate finances for 12 years and it's seemed to work well for us. We combine the "I've got it" approach for little things and "Let's split it" for large shared purchases. It leads to healthy communication and negotiation on large purchases, plus personal responsibility of our own incomes, expenses and savings. Large purchases that are not shared can be subject to opinion, but never control. Of course, there's no substitute for financial compatibility.

#4 misses some other cases. My spouse and I are firmly in this category, but we also have different spending habits for sure! They buy a lot of little stuff that I don't see as particularly useful, while I don't buy anything at all for months on end, until I spend a whole hell of a lot all at once.

Should be a recipe for disaster, right?

Except it isn't. We just accept that this is who we are, and we're comfortable with that.

The author correctly notes that things can change over time, but they seem to ignore the most important thing to this entire process working: we use our words and talk about things before they become an actual problem.

Since my spouse and I have accepted this scenario as being perfectly fine for us now, our normal doesn't frustrate either of us, even though we are wildly different in our spending approaches. And when things change, we're both comfortable making changes to accommodate those changes.

Some of you might be saying "but yes, averaged out over the year you probably spend the same", and the answer is no. Not even close. I may spend 600$ on a gaming monitor with a 6 month gap on either side, but my spouse ends up spending more like 4000$ on little bits and bobs throughout that same year period. Guess what? This inequality doesn't bother either of us. Why should it? We're in this together and both of us need to be happy with what we're doing. I don't need 6.6667 gaming monitors, and the point isn't to try to equalize our expenditures. Buy what you need to make your life better, and then buy no more.

Or, at least, that has worked for us for the last 15 years. Things could change! Things can always change. But I'm not even remotely worried about that; because that's when we make dinner and sit in front of a couple laptops with a bottle of wine and work out a much more strict budget and emphasize a more restrained approach toward both of our spending patterns. It's happened before, it may happen again, but we'll be fine because we come to a consensus on our financial goals and priorities and neither of us have ever acted in bad faith with regards to achieving those goals and priorities. And if that changes? Well, a more fundamental thing has changed, and maybe we SHOULD have marital strife. And that's okay too.

The article, and comments so far, focus on income only. This is the easy part. A lot of people have savings or investments going in. Perhaps one is renting and the other owns a house. This is where it gets tricky. Especially considering it would be prudent to lay plans that also work well in the event of a divorce.

My partner is what some might call a trust fund baby. Her family is fortunate enough that she need not work. She will likely receive a sizable inheritance. Her parents have shielded her from their wealth, while making sure she always has enough to be comfortable. Neither of us knows how much wealth her family holds. They are very discrete.

I come from a middle class family that spent their money and saved poorly. I took loans out to go to college. I’ve worked my way up in my career in tech and now make a comfortable salary.

This puts us in a situation I feel like this article doesn’t really cover. She doesn’t have a “salary”, but she “makes” more money than I do - however much she needs. I do not plan around her family’s wealth. That is her family’s money, and if/until we ever decide to start our own family, I do not involve myself in their affairs.

What we’ve found works for us, is simply a joint credit card. We put shared expenses on it and split it at the end of the month. We use our shared points on vacations we spend together. It is a way of treating each other as equals, and helps prevent either of us feeling taking advantage of. I maintain my own savings and retirement account. She maintains her own investments. I spend my money however I want and have my own personal card, and her the same.

If I was out a job, she would support me. If her investments tank or her money were cut off, I would support her. It’s rather simple.

The tension we face actually comes from her wealth rather than our lack of it. There are times where she would happily use her wealth as an expression of love. I would never be ok with her father buying us a home. She doesn't understand why not - I was raised to value my own financial independence. I would never feel comfortable living in a home that I did not earn.

How do couples in other similar situations handle this?

I see lots of choices out there, and different things work for different people... and sometimes things evolve, and like relationships the finances should / will too, even when you don't want them to.

It became clear that when my wife went back to school we couldn't sit and do math or rearrange everything all the time. We just put it altogether.

Nothing is easier when married than just putting it into one pot and it is all "our" money. It's not about who does what (maybe one day someone does more dishes, makes more money) and it's all "ours".

But even than if you have a couple with very different spending and someone is more responsible, I don't think it is bad to establish an "allowance" for everyone for as the article describes "splurges".

The important thing is to always be communicating about it.

This sounds basically like have one pot of money, but allow both people to blow some of it every month on unnecessary stuff. Which is the opposite of what a saver personality would like to do. I don't see how it would work in a relationship where one person is blowing the "fun money" every month while the other person saves it. There would still be resentment.

My biggest challenge, not discussed here at all, is how to force my wife into taking financial decisions. Numerous times I’ve tried to walk her through our finances, trying to make our life choices and trade offs more explicit. Yes we could move to a nicer place but we’ll have to cut down on kids activities. I feel I’m taking all the decisions myself.

This was the least surprising result. I thought "combined finances, with an allowance" was basically the default for married couples who have been together a long time and/or since they were fairly young.

Currently my wife and I just contribute an equal amount to a joint account for the mortgage and car, and the rest is basically "I've got it" in a proportional sense. It basically works because we spend less than we make, so we have savings. I'm currently out a TON of money for an upcoming vacation, but I kind of have the sense that it all works out in the end, because I am not (yet) out of money, and if I have to dip into "my" savings to pay the bills from the trip, well, from a net perspective "we" still have the same amount of money as if I asked her to pony up some to pay my credit card this month.

But of course, this fails plenty of tests, and will have to be re-thought if one of us ends up out of work.

What if one spouse makes seven figures and the other is unemployed and takes care of the household? The income disparity then is too high for this, it seems to me, but maybe it's just me.

This is exactly the system that we use. The downsides that we have encountered so far:

- Pooling our money in a shared account makes it seem like we have money than we actually do, leading to overspending

- We each have different ideas of what is a necessary expense

To fix this, we had to start communicating a lot more about finances than we used to. We wound up creating a spreadsheet to track recurring expenses and calculate our monthly budget. We decide ahead of time what we're going to spend money on, and talk about it when unexpected expenses occur.

The benefits of this system seem to outweigh the downsides, so we'll probably keep doing this for the foreseeable future.

This is interesting. I looked around a bit for decent surveys or studies that break down statistics about couples who share finances this way versus using some other system, but I'm having a hard time finding any.

There are some surveys on why couples with joint accounts also maintain individual accounts, one of which seems to indicate independence is the biggest factor (38% of respondents). Only 16% said they did it for ease of budgeting, which to me seems to indicate that the system recommended by the article is relatively uncommon. [0]

For us, we keep it relatively simple. We have some savings from before the marriage in separate accounts that we use for stuff like surprise gifts or security when we need to pay something that requires a direct transfer online. Everything else comes from the joint account or goes through a joint credit card that we pay off every month.

Although our opinions still differ slightly on some long term goals that we won't have to decide on for a while, generally if there's a disagreement we just talk it out. We consult each other on expensive purchases, generally non-necessities over a certain amount. We've both supported each other through periods of temporary unemployment or income differences. Admittedly, having similar values and living in a low cost of living area helps a lot with this.

I'm not sure the system in the article would help too much for resolving expensive decisions unrelated to individual hobbies. For example, if one person wants to spend a larger portion of income on housing that requires more joint contribution, there's still a possible conflict. It does make those kind of decisions have a discussion built in by default though, which is definitely a good thing.

Overall it seems to me that the key thing is that people are having healthy discussions and making decisions together - including decisions around what to leave totally up to the other person, like the article's system does. Some conflict might be totally avoidable, but I think there's no way around just learning how to resolve disagreements respectfully.

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/td-bank-survey-find...

Our system: I make more, and I pay for the biggest expenses (mortgage, and previously cars and student loans before we paid those off) and have healthcare and whatnot taken from my paycheck.

She makes less but still a decent amount and pay for the smaller bills.

Every once in a while, she'll pay for a big-ticket item (like a vacation or a large house repair) out of her savings, which accumulate faster than mine, to catch up.

It works because we started together with next to nothing, so we're both big savers: Our combined income our first year together after college a little over ten years ago was probably a quarter of what we'll make this year. We both max out (or come very close to maxing out) retirement now. She has more cash on hand because I'm paid proportionately more in various types of stock incentives, so when my incentives vest I tend to sell the company stock to diversify but keep the money in investments).

We live in a small house, no kids, reasonably cheap cars, vacations are often tacked on to work trips to save money, no expensive hobbies.

I doubt I'll "retire" early but our savings mean if I decide to leave tech in a decade and become a woodworker or park ranger, I can with no monetary consequences.

Betting the OP doesn’t have kids. Until you have kids you are playing the game on easy mode

The biggest problem with the approach is large, optional purchases that effect quality of life. Things that are too big for “fun money”

Remodeling or Upgrading a house Private school for kids Vacations Vacation property Nice cars College savings Rainy day funds

One way to handle such is for both partners to agree on % saved out of the joint account and/or minimum balance

In Prudent, you can combine multiple journals. Your wife can maintain a separate journal while you maintain another one. This way, both parties can do whatever they want or agree to some set of rules. Most importantly, at any time, you or your wife can see the combined financial strength, or individual financial situation. Awareness of both can make a big difference in making important financial decisions. Avoid being penny wise, pound foolish. The combined report (of savings, etc.) gives both of you better insights on the financial journey that you can embark together (i.e. buying a house, having kids, moving cities, etc.)

https://docs.prudent.me/docs/combining

We just have joined everything. If we split, it would be 50/50 but I'd probably end up giving her most of the stuff, I already find that we have way too much stuff as it is. I like the simplicity of it all even though it might not be advantageous financially for me.

Personally, I find that "fun money" is the easy part. We both splurge from time to time but it is reasonable for the most part. The hard part is the big shared expenses which you'll never be able to cover with "fun money" or it sucks to do alone (house renovations, cars, trips, entertainment etc.) for which 1 partner doesn't see the value of the shared expense.

I'll bite it.

With nowadays lifestyle and state of Law doesn't make sense to marry in the traditional sense. Ok you can do a pre-nup but that is a huge hassle for the couple.

People value stuff differently and on the long term ignoring that is a certain path to regrets. So the best, IMHO, each one should keep legally their stuff with some joint ventures on common projects (house, etc). However I'm not saying to strictly split every expense or be stingy. I'm happy to pay most of daily expenses, holydays or extras. I just don't want to wake up one day feeling used neither legally get stuff from my partner or her family.

Me and my boyfriend are students. I have a good student job, while my boyfriend has a large amount of savings. The last system here would just amount to him giving me his savings.

Our system is that we have a shared account, and we keep track of how much money we have both put into that account. I've put in about half what he has put in, because he spent a lot of money when we bought all of the furniture etc. for our rented apartment, when we moved in. So then I just put in a bit more than him each month, until we reach the same level.

While I’m sure it works for the OP, I’m guessing most other options would work.

My take is that this approach just moves the discussion to what qualifies as “fun money” or should come out of the shared account.

Maybe it’s because we are too young yet, but me and my SO just have a shared account and contribute to it equally (she insisted, I wanted to do proportional). We make sure to put in there enough to cover the bills and some more to have some “emergency money”.

Aside from that we keep separate savings accounts and some investments.

My wife and I had split finances while we were dating and for a few years after we got married. The thing that tipped us into "everything shared" was when we were expecting our first kid and my wife left her job. At that point split finances just didn't make any sense. Now we have a system basically identical to the OP's system and everybody is happy with it.

The case #4 missed is "yay we have so much disposable income that really it doesn't matter, and this entire article is academic". That might be common on Bay Area-dominated HN, but not in most of the world, where I suppose this article is targeted at. I guess wealthy people don't need advice on how to combine finances :-)

Personally I find "she spends $4000 a year on stuff I don't see the value of but I'm fine with that" nearly unimaginable. I could only see myself have that attitude if we really had thousands of dollars (or euros, in our case) of net disposable income every month, after retirement savings and everything.

Pretty much every sentence of your comment is true for my wife and I. What's "fair" is whatever everyone is happy with. I can't imagine being upset because my wife spent more money than me in the abstract.

My uncle is in a similar situation. Currently he's out of a job and he's being supported by her. He told me he had difficulties with the wealth of his wife when he was younger but the older he got, the more he got comfortable with it. He made me realize how much perspective switching there has to be involved in a situation like his since they both value money differently.

Effectively you're under their families power, being "discreet" and doling out money adhoc I wouldn't view as positive, it's them maintaining permanent control. I've long thought that the approach taken by my parents with far less money was pretty good- you get an allocation at 18, more if you're using to to go to uni. If there's any left over at 21 you get the remainder but after that there's nothing more and no expectation of inheritance. I'd try to follow something like this regardless of scale, if it's a couple of million maybe set up a fund that stops at 25

My wife and I do this, and while we're both savers by nature, I'm more of a saver, so I end up piling up the fun money while she tends to spend hers (I think. Mostly. I don't actually know how much she has in her personal account because I don't care)

There's no resentment because we already agreed that fun money isn't part of savings or long-term planning. And the fun money is a small enough part of our overall budget that it doesn't impact important goals.

From a "resentment" point of view, it's much better for me to have pre-agreed on $x a month that's going to be spent frivolously than it is to have a conversation about each frivolous purchase as it comes.

And I do still spend my fun money, I just spend it in larger chunks. She's more likely to spend regularly on things like lunch and events with friends, I'm more likely to save up for a while then buy a new power tool, or rent a cabin for a weekend ski trip.

> blow some of it every month on unnecessary stuff.

Sounds like you are a saver. I'd like to point out that resentment can go both ways.

They addressed this in the article. A conversation needs to be had to decide as a couple how much (non-zero amount of) money is to be spent. It can easily be a low number, if that's what the couple agrees on. As long as the couple comes together in that conversation, there should not be any resentment.

If there is resentment after that conversation (as long as the agreement is followed), the "resenter" is in the wrong.

There's no way to create a budget the solves the problem of partners fundamentally disagreeing about the economic model of their shared life.

I guess it depends on what happens with the saver's extra saved money. If it just gets used for larger fun purchases less frequently, there's no problem. If the saver uses the extra cash to invest and it's understood that it's still the saver's fun money, even when it comes time to withdraw that money during retirement, that's fine.

If it goes into the shared retirement accounts, then that might cause problems.

Then again, it just depends on attitudes. If you're a saver, but recognize that your partner's happiness in part depends on spending more, then perhaps you just won't care.

At the end of the day, you've jointly agreed on what the monthly allowance of fun money is, so there shouldn't be resentment. If there is, then you agreed to something you shouldn't have. If your partner can't agree to a lower amount, then you just have to accept that your financial/spending compatibility is low, and decide that the rest of the relationship overcomes that incompatibility. Or not, and then you break up.

That's the beauty of the system...each one should not care what the other does with their 'allowance'. If one wants to save, or invest, or what have you, while the other one buys gifts for your neighbor's aunt because they like giving gifts to everyone...well, so be it. It is not from the centrally held account so it is perfectly fine.

Meanwhile, that central account and the rules of expenditure are rock solid and it will remain unmolested with wild gift giving, or extravagant lunches, or a risky investment, or the burning desire to save every penny under a mattress.It is resentment free.

An easy hack around this is to not know what the balance is in the other persons fun money account. If you treat the 'fun money' as gone as soon as it is paid out, then there is no resentment.

We save some of our “fun money” for things like buying gadgets or that extra monitor I might not “really” need, don’t see why there would be resentment?