Merging Money — What’s Your Style?
It’s wedding season in much of America, which means there’s a lot of talk about combining households and whether or not to combine finances as well.
We use the his, hers & ours method for our money. In our case, this means that both of us contribute a fixed amount twice-monthly to joint checking and savings accounts, and both of us keep separate accounts for the rest of our funds. We were both married previously, and in those marriages we each had combined finances. (Which partly explains why we decided not to do the same in our marriage.)
I’ve seen pros and cons to both methods, but this one is working well for us. The only method I haven’t tried is keeping completely separate finances while married. That I think would be very hard to do, but of course I don’t actually know, since I’ve never gone that route.
If you’re married or in a long-term relationship, have you merged your money? How has your choice worked out for you?
My girlfriend and I do the same as you, his, hers, ours. Both of our companies have direct deposit with the option to set up multiple accounts up. So we both have a direct despot setup for our joint account and a second one setup to send the reamining to our personal accounts.
I think so far it has worked out really well for us. But the most important thing is that we talked to each other about it a lot before making the final descision. I believe this so important.
That’s nice that you can set up direct deposit to multiple accounts. I should probably get that set up too; it’d save time.
We’re 100% joint on everything (minus retirement accounts which can only be individual, but we have given each other access to them). There’s no right or wrong way with this, but I did just read “Financial Ever After” by Jeff Opdyke and found it to have some good tips in this regard.
Curt, hm, I didn’t know you could give anyone other than yourself access to a retirement account.
We have completely separate accounts. My husband coughs up his 1/2 each month and I pay all the joint bills. He loathes any and all things money management, whereas I am obsessed with it, so it works well for us. People tend to freak out when they hear that we don’t have a joint account, but our expenses so low and common bills so few, it would be ridiculous to have a separate account to manage.
That’s great that your expenses are so low :)