This is so interesting to me! Would love to hear more about how you invest this way. What kinds of talks have you had about strategy and buying?
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It sounds like you want to talk about it with him. 
That seems reasonable to me, especially if one or both of you are even vaguely thinking about marriage. Marriage is, at itâs heart, a tax and asset management tool. (can you tell Iâm aromantic? LOL)
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That surprises me. A name change doesnât mean a person is like, a WHOLE NEW PERSON. I expect to have my bank and credit card companies acknowledge who I am when I get around to legally changing my name for transgender reasons.
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Nope, not at all. Your previous name + credit history transfers over.
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I have a prenup! And at the same time we manage money almost completely in one pot 
No time to read/reply to everything ow but I will come back with more details tonight or tomorrow
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I actually am purposefully not going to discuss it until after I pass the probationary period of my job and have some savings and hopefully my $2,700 credit debt is gone or at least going down. I like to have demonstrable results. So thats 9months to 1 year from now.
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My prenup specifies things like âif a partner takes out debt in their name only, it stays their debt onlyâ which is at least worth thinking about and discussing! Prenups just set your own rules for separation vs the states so I encourage everyone to at least understand the laws theyâre currently under.
Ok now I really have to get off the internet for a bit. More later!
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When I met DH I had 5 figures of student loans as well as about 5k consumer debt and he had no debt at all. He lived very frugally and I was living beyond my means. There was a Situation at my old job where my employer got a new accounting software and messed up payschedules and rescheduled them so that everyone had to give back an entire paycheck. During this time I found MMM. I got a new job and with my bonus year 1, paid off the consumer debt. With bonus year 2, I paid off most of the loans. DH knew I was working to pay down debt but I donât think I fully told him about how much I had til we moved in together, at which point I had that new job and an aggressive payoff plan. He offered to help me pay off the student loans but I refused because my plan was gonna work (and it did). Looking back Iâm glad I did it that way! We did have a talk about how if he wanted to go out to eat etc while I was in payoff mode he would take that cost on. Otherwise I was happy to find free or cheap stuff to do together and split.
When we met he had all of his savings in his savings account. I taught him about Roth IRAs and passive investing. That was fun! He got to learn along with me. I think we see each other as financial equals a result of all of this!
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Totally your call! You get to choose how and when you reveal your financial details to others, including people you are in a relationship with.
eta: unless it like, is gonna result in someone coming to their door with a warrant or like, a baseball bat. Then they should know. 
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Itâs the first Iâd heard about something like that happening!
I sure hope so! This is my expectation
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Oh yes. Would love to open a joint burrito account with you.
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Unmarried and mostly separate finances.
We each pay half of rent. Until we moved, he paid me his half of rent and I paid our landlord. That changed when we moved and our landlord here wanted Venmo payment, because my Venmo account has been broken since we moved cross country and Venmo is not interested in fixing it after many calls with their customer service. I assume they think something fraudulent is going on due to the change in location and IP address.
We split our other bills in a way that feels fair to us. We sat down and went over our utility expenses and came up with a split that felt fair to us. That resulted in: he pays gas/electric (a combined bill here) and car insurance. I pay renters insurance, Internet, and water. This results in us roughly paying the same amount for utilities.
At the end of every month, we total up what we have paid for food expenses and cat expenses and settle up. I pay like 90% of this up front but sometimes Boyfriend makes a grocery run on his own. We take turns gassing up the car and paying for meals out. If there is a social thing we want to do, we negotiate who is paying for it or if we are each paying our own admission, this has a lot to do with how much each of us actually wants to do it. If we have a big expense we discuss, ie, I was willing to pay for half of the lawnmower but not for half of some furniture he wants for his office.
Neither of us has debt so that is not an issue.
The only joint thing we have is a down payment savings fund that we both contribute to.
This seems to be working for us.
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Itâs been 20 years, so there have been a lot, and Iâve probably forgotten many of them. We often talked money on walks because I wanted to make sure I wasnât doing anything they didnât feel comfortable with. In general I have higher risk tolerance.
We started out pretty standard with what any banker would tell you - a 60/40 portfolio of bank mutual funds (probably 20 US/20CA/20 international). Automatically putting money into them every paycheck. Then I discovered MERs, and we moved them to a different set of mutual funds, but it was still 60/40, automatically investing every pay. We didnât switch to buying ETFs regularly until quite late, we liked the hands off automation of the mutual funds to help us keep emotions out of things.
I guess there were discussions after each pay increase, how much to change our spending vs. to invest - did either of us feel deprived. For a while it was that we each took out $80, and that was to cover transit and food (weâd go to the grocery store together and pool the money), with the assumption that around $20 was pocket money. And then we got a better cash back credit card, and we stopped doing regular cash withdrawals. These discussions were similar to the ones we had around splitting home chores.
Then we had discussions about how big an emergency fund to have (how many months at bare bones), whether to pay down the house faster or invest more (we paid down the house instead of figuring out non-registered investments - my concern, or dealing with high volatility - theirs), and eventually dropping to 30%, then 25% then 20% then 15% bonds as we felt more ok about taking on that volatility.
They donât care about the distribution of US vs. Canada vs. International, beyond us both being sad that weâre always rebalancing more into international and hope that one day that will pay us back by shooting up. And I figure I have no idea, so I just try to keep them reasonable. We donât have set times to rebalance, mostly when we have an influx of money.
Basically I do a bunch of research, try to explain what I think the change in strategy should be, and they indicate whether that feels too risky or not. And if itâs too risky, I do more research, and revisit the conversation in 6 months if I still think it is a good idea.
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I bit of history. Itâs almost certainly better now. When DH and I got married, in the early 1980s and I hyphenated my last name and kept my finances separate, we got all kinds of responses:
Youâre not legally married.
Youâll get divorced, because youâre not really committed to the relationship.
If you have a hyphenated name and give it to your kid and they marry someone with a hyphenated name, what are their kids called? (The answer I finally came up with for that one was, âI donât know. Thatâs up to them.â)
Youâll get audited every year because having a different name is illegal.
Youâll get audited all the time.
(To DH) Wow, Iâm sorry. Your wife must be a feminist, right? (No, my dad had 2 girls, my sister had already changed her name and didnât want kids. I did. My husband has FIVE brothers, 4 of whom had already had kids. His name wasnât going anywhereâŚ)
Long ago (weâve been married > than 40 years now) we co-mingled most of our finances. Still, banks every now and then have decided that Iâm not a real person. American Express did that once, a few months after our credit union did, I was starting to get a complex!
We sent our first mortgage paperwork back three times because I wouldnât sign it with anything other than my legal name.
If I had known what a PITA it was going to be, I wouldnât have done it. The banks/credit cards Fâing it up was the worst part, because we had checks bounce and other fun and games. And the funniest one was my Dad, who just couldntâ remember to put his name and my husbandâs together, although my MIL didâŚ
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i laugh because I kept my surname and DH kept his. My MIL was DELIGHTED that her DIL was keeping her own name (sheâd reverted to her maiden name after divorcing) and my Dad was a bit huffy about me not being traditional the kids have my surname as a second middle and if they want to change their surname later weâll help with the paperwork.
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We recently (like this past summer) converted our separate checking accounts into two joint ones, ditto for savings, which weâd had in my name only. We kept separate when we married because we knew we wanted a mortgage or land loan in the early years of our marriage and my credit was shot at the time. Then inertia kept us just doing it that way for years. The separation was just on paper, though: for a decade his check was direct deposited into my account because I paid the bills.
Iâm working on simplifying things and reducing the number of accounts so he will have an easier time managing everything if something happens to me. And weâre working to get some money into retirement accounts in his name . Itâs almost all in mine because Iâve had far and away the better options in employment-based accounts, so we put everything we could afford to in those. He has mostly IRAs, so a lot less money since their limits are lower.
Also had to get him a credit card in his own name couple years back, because heâs just been authorized user on mine and will lose access to them in the event of my death.
Boy pandemics make you think of the depressing stuff.
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Joint everything. Except Mrs PDM has student debt but because weâre in Australia itâs not the same as the US. More a modest amount that gets paid back automatically with tax return from income once above certain thresholds (that arenât current met working part time - and are individual not couple based). Doesnât accrue interest but does index.
A quick google tells me that debt is hers and doesnât become mine if she dies.
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Joint everything. We âcombinedâ in mint first when I found MMM and started taking finances seriously. Then truly combined after getting married. (I took his last name). Technically we both still have our stand alone accounts still, but we just donât use them.
First random question aside- no, nothing weird with my name and credit!
No prenup or anything. We started dating fairly young (22, just out of college). Pretty much all our financial and career choices have been made together. Weâve always been fully on the same page with money. We felt almost forced pretty early into a lot of financial conversations, because I had a job that was treating me really poorly and yanking around what shift I was on, and I ended up getting extremely ill at that job. At the time my parents were having problems, and werenât willing to continue to support me and they very much pulled the rug out from under me unexpectedly. Anyway, then boyfriend-now Husband offered to just pick up all my expenses since we were living together and give me the opportunity to go back to school for a better career. We were pretty open very early on that we were just planning a life together, and we proceeded accordingly.
As a result of the back to school, I did have about $75,000 in debt when we got married. In student debt. But I was also the only one of us with any appreciable assets, I had a bunch of mutual funds and stocks from when I was younger and my dad teaching us about investing, and then also me saving and investing a lot of my money as I grew up. So I had essentially a zero net worth, as did my husband because he had neither death nor assets. So we just kind of started somewhere near zero when we first got married. The first year of our marriage, we took my brother into live with us because he had had a Trumatic brain injury and couldnât really live independently, and he wanted to live in a very cheap area of the city because of where his work was. So that plus really leaning into frugality and both of us working full time (him engineering, me nursing) meant that we paid down all my debt and saved up for a down payment on a house in about a year and a half in there.
I feel like I honestly see him truly as an extension of myself. Weâre an inseparable team. It doesnât feel any less safe to have my money combined with him than it does for me to have my own credit card lol. I donât know if that makes any sense, we just have been together so long and so thoroughly at this point that us as separate is a pretty foreign concept. Heâs as merged to my sense of self as my daughter is.
We are both active in the money management, although I absolutely take point. Iâm the one that does all the day today budget tracking, and makes most of the spending decisions in our family. Although he does the actual task of doing the taxes, but Iâm the one that does all the filing and preparation through the year to be able to do that. We still go through Mint, with all of our accounts linked, and even though itâs mainly me who looks at it, he does occasionally as well. I also sent him monthly State of the Union emails every time I run our numbers. We are authorized users on most of each otherâs credit cards, and just go according to what gets us the best rewards.
This approach has worked really well for us and been really nice, just because we donât have to worry about any shuffling of how anything is divided or anything like that as weâve changed jobs and school and not an stay at home parenting and all of that.
I do still have retirement accounts in my name, and we contribute fully to my Roth IRA each year.
I feel like as soon as you add kids to the mix trying to keep finances separate gets way more tangled. And especially a SAH parent, obviously.
We also have parents on fairly similar financial footing, so I donât necessarily see one of us ending up holding the bag on our parents care and resenting the other or anything like that. Not that that would happen anyway, but there just arenât a lot of financial disparities that typically call for a prenup that we foresaw.
Uhhhh I forget what random questions there were. We discuss EVERYTHING. To death. To quote a certain forum member who once visited us âoh my god you donât need to discuss why you picked a parking space! Youâre so communicative and happy, itâs nauseatingâ (something along those lines. From this forumer, it was of course said with love). This is just how we operate, so it makes staying on the same page financially really easy. We discuss basically every single non grocery purchase, and it doesnât chafe for either of us cuz weâre just wired this way I guess
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My wife wanted a prenup, and we never mixed finances. Sometimes I took her out on a date, and sometimes she took me out. During periods of co-habitation we split rent, and otherwise just figured the bills would equal out. It was a very low drama system that worked for a decade, aided by the fact that weâre both savers who earned about the same amount.
The prenup made financial separation the least crushing part of the whole emotional smoosh-down of getting divorced. It wasnât strictly necessary since we didnât mix finances, had no property, and didnât spawn, but I still liked that everything was laid out.
ETA: our bank accounts were all joint tenants with rights of survivorship, which were easy to convert back to standard accounts. We also named each other as beneficiaries on the insurance/retirement/brokerage accounts. Changing that was just a matter of informing everyone of the new beneficiaries.
I had a will that made her my inheritor. Getting a new will made was kind of a pain, partly because I live in the North East but Iâm a resident of WA state and needed to actually sign the will in WA state, and partially because my new inheritors are all minor children. I ended up flying home for Christmas, signing the will, and making a trust. Boom!
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