How do you manage the finances in your relationship?

Person_one

SkintGypsy wrote: »

That makes perfect sense for now, but if you ever give up your career/wage to bring up his children, it might stick in the throat a bit to have to ask him for housekeeping!

Or if he lost his job, and you were footing all the bills for a while and you both suffered financial hardship as a result. Does he pay you back? Do you have less of a social life cos he can't afford to pay half?

In my view, it all depends on the permanency of your life together. If you are planning a future then you are a team with the same goals. I don't see how separate finances can work long term really, unless the relationship isn't that stable and you need to keep things separate in case of a split.

We both know that we may need to rethink things in the future as circumstances change, but I do feel that while we're not married and have no children its good to keep things as equal as possible. I may be made redundant fairly soon so we'll see how things pan out when that happens!

Jakem, seeing as you're already divorcing him I suppose this is moot but do you ever talk about this with your husband? I'm sorry you've been so unhappy.

Person_one

Errata wrote: »

I struggle to understand why people in a relationship think nothing of sharing body fluids, but when it comes to hard cash it's a very different story.

Well its often hard to pay the bills or obtain goods and services with bodily fluids and you get a pretty much limitless supply!

Treacly

Errata wrote: »

I struggle to understand why people in a relationship think nothing of sharing body fluids, but when it comes to hard cash it's a very different story.

True, but then 'sharing bodily fluids' is always the easy bit isn't it? It's trust and communication that's hard. And it's only common sense to retain some control of your income - an older female friend on the rough end of a divorce advised me decades ago to ALWAYS keep control of my own money, and she was dead right - and I know my OH respects me for it.

savingmummy

My husband works fulltime, i`m a stay at home mum to 2 children under 4.
My husband pays the majority of the bills. I pay for his loan repayments now (never used too but i`m debtfree now) and also groceries.
I buy clothes and xmas which i save throughout the year.
When i was working (no children) i paid rent and groceries, he paid council tax and home utilities.
We share our income - although most goes on bills

MERFE

I see how in your situation where you are both earning similar amounts it would work well, however have a few children be a SAHM for a while without a wage and it would go to pot, so obviously everyone situation is different because their circumstance are. We had the exact arrangement you did prekids, with the first it made more sense to return to work parttime and even then most my wage went on childcare rather than in the joint account and the rest on buying baby items. So OH became reasponsible for the bills and my money is for extras. OH has about £200 a month that is his own to spend as he wishes and he does. We have it this way because I save mine (he never would, he tries but always finds something he absolutely needs!!!) so I pay for holidays, days out etc although we decide where to go together I just look after the money and stop OH from overspending. Hopefully one day when I'm working full time again and there is no need for childcare (probably in about 8 years at least) we can go back to both putting the same in the joint account to cover the bills and keeping the rest of our wages to ourselves but for the minute if OH even suggested it I'd ask him to leave because it would bankrupt me to try and keep up with his wage (which is over 4X mine at the moment but I'm training whilst working and when I am able to go back to full time we should be pretty even again).

penelopedee_2

OH is not the best with making his money last! So what works for us, is that the majority of both our money goes into one account for all the bills and savings etc and then we both keep a little back for our spending money. That way I know there is enough for all the direct debits etc and I also make sure some is squirrelled away each month for savings. He would just spend it otherwise! We also have a joint wage on top of our normal money so it works better like this. At the moment the bills account is in my name but that is just for convenience really, we are married and treat everything as both of ours. If one of us ran out of spending money or needed something big then we would just say and sort something out between us. I think as long as you are always open and talking about money then you will be ok. When OH was out of work I made sure the bills were covered and when I wanted to go part-time this year he made sure he earnt enough to keep the bills account topped up.

boliston

I'd vote for keeping separate bank accounts because as soon as you get into joint bank account territory then there is legally a "financial link" so that if one partner gets a CCJ then this can affect the other partner's credit rating. As long as each partner keeps a track of any joint expenses that have been paid then they can do a reconcile and funds transfer at the end of each month.

Dear_Prudence

We are married and as far as we concerned there is no notion of "my" and "his" money, we are a family unit so everything goes into the same pot.

We get paid into a joint account and all our bills come out of that. All our savings are shared. Even when we both had different debts when we got married we just saw it all as "our" debt and paid it off together.

The only separate money we have is that we both have a small allowance that goes into a personal account each month for hobbies and for presents for each other at Christmas, birthdays (so it's a surprise!)

I manage the finances but we make strategy decisions together and we talk about financial stuff regularly.

I love doing it this way and it means that I won't be "asking" for money when we have a kid and I'm staying at home - we both agree that by staying at home I will be enabling him to do his job, so the money is ours.

It works really well most of the time! We had REALLY different approaches to money when we got together (he was a spender, I was a [STRIKE]tightwad[/STRIKE] saver) but over the years we have come a lot closer together so we have a fairly similar approach now.

Hope that helps!

Maria81

I have been with my OH for years now and we have always and will always keep our separate bank accounts, for no other reason that i like having money that i don't feel i need to explain why i withdraw some and visa versa, we have savings accounts which we both have access too and one account for house hold bills etc.
Even though we both have our own accounts we each know that we share whatever money we have, but i just like that keeping at least them things separate.

One of my friends did the one account together approach, and it didnt work at all, they argued over who took what out for what and when, how much, too much, etc.

To me its much simpler the way we do it. We know that each others money is there if we need it but it remains in different accounts and thats all. No big deal.

boliston

Maria81 wrote: »

I have been with my OH for years now and we have always and will always keep our separate bank accounts, for no other reason that i like having money that i don't feel i need to explain why i withdraw some and visa versa...

I really started to cringe the other day when one of my workmates was going on about the new apple ipad and saying that he's not sure his wife "will allow" him to get one.....OMG! :eek: