difficult money conversations with OH

Alpha58

For a man's perspective - during the first few years of marriage I must have been an absolute nightmare. I was secretive about money but largely (in hindsight) because of wanting to keep money for myself to pay for the toys that boys tend to buy themselves. I realised the hard way that I was utter crap with money so passed over all the finances to my OH - and also decided to "man up" a bit and be responsible.

We have complete clarity in terms of bank accounts - we are with an online bank so can access details of what is moving through each account. My entire salary goes into our joint account and I transfer across bits and bobs as I need them, but the interesting thing is that once I owned up to what I was spending money on, she was actually fine about it (within reason!) so the moral of the story is that honesty is the best policy!

I can appreciate that there will be differences in culture and also in income (I have always earned more than my OH) but it's not a pi**ing contest about who earns what, it's a collective effort to fund a life together. In my very humble opinion!