Love & Money

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Ok we finished burritos and a movie and now I can write out the whole saga.

When we moved in together we opened a joint savings (should probably have been checking but it was easier to open a savings account at an online bank) and a joint credit card. We contributed to the joint savings account proportionally by income (so he paid twice as much as me since I was in grad school making $24k). We didn’t really need to revisit until he quit his (toxic) job right before I graduated and we were living off my postdoc salary and everything immediately became joint. Now we still have bank accounts without the other persons name on them, and will keep at least one + one solo credit card in case of emergencies, but we treat everything joint.

I originally wanted a prenup and looked into it deeply. I had savings and an inheritance from my grandmas life insurance that I didn’t want to automatically go to him (neither of us had significant student loans, for different reasons). But I looked at the laws around communal property and none of the states we were thinking of living in were communal property states, so it seemed likely that if I didn’t deliberately put the money in a joint account then the court would continue to say it was mine. I moved all the money into a joint account in January because I was trying to fill out some financial stuff and we had 10 bank accounts (not including credit cards, retirement, HSA) and that is too many I wanted to simplify. Plus it’s been long enough (5 years) that it does feel like money I want to benefit both of us, not “my money my grandma left me.”

And I kept my name and am like 3% bummed he didn’t take mine. But my last name is already my mom’s (my sister has our dad’s) so I always knew that was a dealbreaker, even before I got that sweet Dr Pants title.

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42

Just realized this is revisionist history. I didn’t get the inheritance until after the wedding. But I did have my own savings that I had managed to put together out of the grad school salary that I was really proud of and wanted to remain “mine”

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I think that’s how you bring up then! As a “hey I want to celebrate this milestone and it matters a lot because I have x debt.”

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Agreed. We also see it as being on a team and were fully combined before I stopped working.

Our trajectory was: get together young when we both have nothing and keep finances technically separate but pool most stuff in reality. So we used the envelope system and both got paid in cash and he pretty much handed his cash to me to sort out, which means in that sense we were combined- but we still had separate bank accounts and I had retirement savings accounts way before he did. Functionally though we were pretty combined, like I helped him pay for some college courses before we were married, and he paid for everything when I was out of work for 3 months really early in our relationship.

When we got engaged I started to formally combine stuff because after years of managing separate finances I could not fucking wait to only have one shared account, lol. It was a huge pain in the ass keeping things separate and I only did it to protect myself pre-marriage.

Now we’re all in together, which I think is easier not only from a management of accounts position but also in terms of having a shared financial vision. We set financial goals together and then we achieve them together. When I made more money it was still our net worth increasing, and now that he is the only earner our net worth is still increasing. It’s so easy to keep track of where we are financially because it’s all really clear and there aren’t a million accounts, but it’s also so much more motivating. Easier to have a rich life vision (if you know you know) when you are fully combined.

Some of like it combined is probably intimacy too. I know it sounds odd to people who prefer things separate, but I’d feel really strange and almost offended if my husband was like, “hey venmo me $50 for shopping the other day”. I think because for me that feels like a roommate? Or like someone he can’t be generous with because he fears things will end up uneven? Or like, I’m not someone he wants to be in business with, lol- that’s how it feels. Like he’s ok being financially intertwined with his job, or a business partner, or even a financial institution, but not with me? IDK, it would turn me off a lot though.

Also I’ve never heard of not being able to get credit cards in your new name (and I changed mine).

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Oh about the “new name new credit” thing. It is supposed to be linked to your SSN, which is how they manage to fix the screwups. But there are absolutely a lot of screwups, when people change their name or have the same name randomly or are Jr vs Sr vs III of the same first and last.

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46

Ok, back with more full answers. I started dating my spouse 15 years ago, moved in together 7 years ago, and got married 6 years ago.

Before we moved in together everything was separate. At first we were both poor graduate students, then he started a postdoc and I went into industry so I was making 2-3x what he was making. I paid for all our flights to visit each other during this period and usually treated to dinner.

We had been seriously discussing marriage by the time I moved in, and after so many years together I was tired of the money transfer game (pre Venmo lol). So I proposed that we create a joint budget in ynab for household essentials (rent, groceries, utilities) and keep everything else separate. I’m pretty sure we created a joint savings account at that point and both transferred a set amount of money into the joint account each month that would cover the budgeted expenses. I contributed a little more, but not proportional to the income disparity because I was quite money insecure and was specifically choosing industry as a way to get ahead financially even though it wasn’t my dream job. My then-bf was choosing to follow his dreams with a lower paying postdoc. Because we had similar education levels/fields/earning potential this felt much less fraught than I imagine it would in other situations. At this point I was very into FI and my spouse had a lot less interest in money. He was a low spender but he had a much bigger financial safety net than I did because of his family vs mine.

When we got married we had a prenup. I think we were both on board with the idea. Some of this was for traditional prenup reasons: he will likely inherit at least 6 figures from his mom as an only child. I had chosen a career that would earn much more than him in the short term with the hope of retiring early, he was hoping to earn less for longer in a lifetime academic career. But also, as I said above, when we worked through a NOLO prenup workbook there were several things that we preferred to change vs the default community property laws where we lived.

Some specifics of our prenup:
-If the marriage ended within the first 5 years we would largely leave with what we had come in with and contributed individually to the marriage financially. So if I was earning more the whole time, I would have left with more. We both agreed that after 5 years of a marriage that was continuing the choices we were making would be much more blurred and we would want to even things out then. For example it would be a complex family decision to move to a new city to support one person’s job, or for one of us to stop working for any length of time to care for a kid, etc.
-Any accounts that aren’t joint are only for the person who’s name they are in and not subject to splitting. It was important to me to always have access to money in accounts that was unquestionably mine in case things went badly.

  • Any debt taken in one person’s name is only that person’s debt. If one of us goes through a midlife crisis and wants to invest everything we have in a chicken farm, it protects the other person. If my spouse wants to take out a huge loan for something I’m not comfortable with, or drain his retirement accounts to fund something, that’s on him. Of course, I hope that doesn’t happen and that we stay a team, but I know things can change and if that happened we would probably be heading for divorce anyway lol. I will note that the prenup includes “secret debt” like gambling etc. but I unfortunately know from a friend’s experience that if your spouse runs up tens of thousands in secret debt for questionable activities the courts can put that debt in the offending party even in a community property state.

In theory, our prenup gives us the ability to keep finances as separate or entwined as we want. In practice we currently budget and plan (including retirement planning) together. A token amount from each paycheck goes into our individual accounts so they maintain activity and a healthy balance. Our budget includes equal contributions to retirement accounts even if one person is making more, and all the rest of our paychecks go into a joint account that becomes community property. This has been the norm for the last couple years and it fits well with our current priorities. (but I still have higher net worth of we split because of my earlier years of contributing more to retirement accounts that are only in my name).

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47

I took my husband’s name because I had been still using my ex’s. Didn’t want to go back to my maiden name - that person was just a kid - so the choices were slim.

We were both divorced before we got married and have no prenup. We could see that we had both behaved honorably in our divorces, which is better assurance than any prenup. We have a loose agreement that we would each go out with what we brought in plus half of the increase.

We’re fully joint but actually don’t have a joint checking account. I linked both our accounts to the online savings account and that’s how I move money around if I need to. I keep intending to get him into my credit union but I never get around to it.

The only debt we started out with was a promise to pay his ex wife’s student loan, which we did. It was important to me that we both get out of our previous mortgages before we got married, which we did- my ex moved out and we sold our house (he has been living in it and paying the mortgage but couldn’t refinance) and his ex was able to refinance and keep their house.

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I’m not sure this will be helpful. We have everything together and we have since a few months after we started living together. Neither of us really had any assets when we got together and I had debt but he didn’t. But he didn’t care. He doesn’t think about money much. I pretty much handle it all and he spends what he wants but fortunately, he doesn’t want much and he never balks at my spending and he appreciates my efforts to budget/save/invest. We rarely disagree on money mostly because he just doesn’t care and lets me do whatever with our massive fortune. (That last part may not be entirely accurate.) You can guess that I handle it all because he doesn’t care and I do, at least a little. Not enough to like make a spreadsheet or anything, but a little.

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So in summary, the common theme here seems to be ideally start young and poor together.

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It certainly avoids a lot of angst in some respects, lol.

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It does make the prenup seem like a lot of effort for no reward

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About the article:

I know the idea of keeping accounts separate as a way to protect yourself is common, but i have a few instances recently of acquaintances where the guy used keeping things separate to screw over the woman financially. Financial literacy and education level may have been a factor here. Could be fine in the other gender direction using similar tactics (you pay for this, I’m pay for that, they used the lower income earners to pay equivalent costs/ higher costs and also expected them to do childcare which reduces earnings further) They also started out very young together, and had a mortgage and kids. Generosity in your partner and approaching things like a team is bigger than the financial setup sometimes.

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Young and dumb- met midway through school, she had debt (including a line of credit above and beyond OSAP that I now know was ridiculous. I was on track to finish with exactly $0. Moved in together first as roommates for a semester. And then a year later “permanently”. Moving in cemented the relationship dynamic of me paying for more, especially the boring stuff. I graduated earlier but made less. The tide shifted to her earning more the year we got married. We did a joint account and I shifted some of the savings to more aggressively oay off her student loans. A year later we fully merged our finances, and my disability got worse, she started to take an interest jn money then we put our emergency fund and house downpayment fund except 2 months rent onto her student loans. Couple of weeks later it turned out she was ready for a divorce. Kicked me out of the house illegally and nickle and dimed every transaction. The split fucked me financially and a lot of illegal things happened because I didn’t even know I could have a lawyer on credit. Red flags I didn’t know I was missing included a lack of generosity and a very different familial relationship with resources (her family earned too much for her to qualify for full OSAP which was a big part of the reason for needing private loans, addictions, expecting not to support family, expecting both partners to contribute equally rather than fairly (except when she earned less)

Round two
Started out older and weirder. He was earning 100k/ year more than me, both of us had positive net worths and we just sort of fell into marriage. Green flags, financially supports his family, expects to do the same with mine. Generous with time. Kind to exes. When we accidentally got married it was a Nikkah, in which part of the ‘deal’ is that the husband pays major bills and gives the wife household money to manage and if she earns any money she has a right to keep it (although the Imam pointed out that while the wife doesn’t have to, it is normal here to contribute financially and it can be too expensive otherwise. The bride and groom also agree on a bride price, usually not too much unless it is a house. Dear reader, it was a house, or, more specifically a bedroom for our son. Immediately after, my husband got me on his credit card as an authorized user, but I fucked up activation because I had a different address.

It didn’t matter for another year and a half because I had money coming in. Then he tried to transfer me $500/month but failed. Then I went from good money to a tiny bit of money to no money at all and I panicked and we fought. New authorized user card is in the mail. And Zi sm on the mortgage and house. So it is a work in progress

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My parents are case in point.

They are screwing each other over though and acknowledge that. Something about paying their own ways and not wanting to give any money to lawyers.

Everything is separate. No joke they leave each other nothing in their wills (I don’t know why given I can’t see how that can’t be easily contested anyway). Their house is only in my fathers name because 1970’s so if he dies my mum in theory needs to find somewhere to live. They haven’t not thought this through either, they know this and it’s what they want?

The thing is that I don’t think they know what each other’s assets are and my dad’s, besides the family home, are clearly much larger because my mum paid for things like a private nanny, education and extracurricular costs, groceries, clothing, etc and worked part time when we were younger and my dad is an accountant who salary sacrificed everything he could into his super before that loophole was closed.

My brothers and I (assuming we are the beneficiaries of his will) wouldn’t screw her over, but why do this?

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Yeah, similar situation, lower socioeconomic class in the one I observed. Except that one is divorcing and will go to lawyers soon if the guy doesn’t hurry up and sign some paperwork.

Your parents situation sounds like it is “fun” to navigate…

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My ex didn’t screw me over financially, except that he stole from almost everyone: friends and my dad, or set them up to be robbed. Nice guy. He also slept with most of my female friends, or said he had, and told me at one memorable party, why each of them was better in bed than I was. Nice guy, eh?

Because of that past and other not-great choices with men, on our wedding night I told DH this: if you fall in love with someone else, I get it. Don’t belittle me, make fun of me, or play around, and I’ll exit as cleanly as I can, emotionally and financially. If you degrade me, play around financially, etc. I will take you to the cleaners or do as much damage as I can.

Unusual pillow talk on your honeymoon, but I sure didn’t want to go through anything like what I had before!

When things got really strained between us we’d been married 18-9 years. We got help. We learned how to solve our problems instead of resenting the other one and squelching the issues. So, now we’ve been married 40 years+. However, I owned a lot of Apple stock at one point and sold it before it blossomed. DH and I agreed that if I’d still had that stock we probably would have divorced when things got so bad. Part of what kept us together/trying to solve the problems was that while we had enough, together, separately we’d be struggling… and we’d gotten past that as a couple.

Actually, when I think about it? The ex did steal from me, $5k to be exact. It’s a thing that embarrasses me and it was a long time ago, so I tend to forget it, because of being amazed at how dumb I was…

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This is so interesting reading about others systems and I also like to talk, so strap in!

Howie and I met in our early 30s and both had established careers. Neither of us had been married before but I had cohabitated with a previous partner. Neither of us had any debt. (He only ever had student loans and paid those off aggressively. I had credit card debt in my 20s but had paid it off by that point.) Howie owned a house and had significant investments, maybe $500-$800k net worth. I rented and had a 401k and an emergency fund, but definitely less than $100k net worth. After about a year of dating I made a dramatic career shift to a much less well-paying field and worked multiple part-time jobs for about a year and a half before getting a full time position. I also drew from my savings during that time. We moved in together after close to three years of dating.

We house hunted together, but Howie bought the house on his own. He provided the down payment and pays the mortgage and property taxes. He pays for any home improvements that would add to the value of the home. If we were to split up the house would stay his.

I really didn’t like the idea of paying rent to a partner. Not really because of any practical reason, but I just didn’t like the idea of giving a partner money that was building equity in something that I didn’t own. Obviously I had no problem doing that with a landlord, but it just didn’t feel good to me when I thought about it in the situation with Howie. Howie didn’t want to automatically divide things based on a percentage of our income for emotional reasons that made sense to him. What we ended up with is very close to what it would be if I paid him rent and/or if we split expenses proportionally, but we arrived at it in a different way that worked better emotionally for both of us.

I tracked all of my spending pretty closely. Howie did not and said he didn’t want to go back to doing that - he did that for years in his 20s and felt like he was at a point financially where he didn’t have to do that anymore and really enjoyed that.

Neither of us wanted to do lots of little transactions or split things frequently. We both preferred dividing up responsibilities of who pays for what instead. We both trust each other to take care of our responsible areas. I know he won’t flake on paying the mortgage and he trusts I won’t forget to pay the electric bill.

We both wanted to keep our own personal spending separate that the other person had no say in.

So Howie pays for the mortgage, property taxes, and home improvements.
I pay for utilities, groceries, gym memberships, and house cleaning.
We each pay for our own cars and pets.
Vacations took a while to figure out and we tried a few different things. Finally we arrived at:

  • For regular vacations, I take the lead on planning and we split expenses 75/25. I generally pay for everything in the moment then give him a bill at the end.
  • For travel to races, we split it 50/50
  • For family obligations, the person whose family it is pays

We’ve made tweaks to things over the years. Like we originally split the cost of house cleaning but then I offered to take all of it. When we first moved in and I was more strapped for cash I asked him to take over the water bill at least temporarily because it was more of a lumpy expense that was harder for me to absorb.

We have separate accounts that we use for most everything. We do have a shared checking account that we use to transfer money back and forth when needed. But it’s not used frequently because of the way we split bills. Generally it’s just used for transferring vacation money. We only got it because the gym we were members of wouldn’t give us the discounted couples rate unless we had a joint bank account, even though we lived at the same address. But it has been convenient!

Before moving in together we made a (completely not legally binding) cohabitation agreement. It spells out who is responsible for what and what would happen if we were to split. It certainly doesn’t cover every situation, but I think it was good to talk through at least the major scenarios.

We are each other’s beneficiaries on our life insurance policies and retirement accounts.

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Smaller financial things that have required navigating:

  1. Offering to pay for things like dinner, etc. I am from a family where everyone tries to pay. You offer, the other person refuses, you insist, etc. Sometimes it’s just a simple “Let me get that” “Oh, no, I’ll get it” “No, I’ve got it” “Ok, well, thank you! Next time is my treat.” Other times it’s more involved, up to and including pretending to go to the bathroom to track down the server and secretly give them your credit card. Howie’s family is the exact opposite. “Let me get that.” “Ok” That was a real shock for me when we started dating. I was used to doing the “let me pay” dance and then having it roughly work out to taking turns. He took things way more at face value and would just take me up on it whenever I offered.

  2. Reimbursing each other for things. I tend to round things up. I think it’s a holdover from using cash. I recognize that there is no logical reason for this when doing an electronic transfer, but it still was really jarring for me at first. Like, if I said, “Your share of the vacation was $494.96,” Howie would transfer $494.96 and I’d be kind of taken aback. I would have just transferred $500. It’s not like typing zeros is that much easier or anything. Transferring the exact amount just kind of struck me as petty or penny-pinching or something? Now I know to expect it, though, so it’s not a shock or upsetting. But it was really weird to me at first.

A big thing that is not an issue now, but could be down the road:

Howie requires much more money to feel financially secure. Actually, I don’t know if he’ll ever feel secure. He says he’ll retire when he has $4.3 million and I guarantee that won’t happen. He is very worried about running out of money and very strongly doesn’t want to be a “burden” to anyone else. I’m more worried about running out of time/life than money. If we’re still together a decade from now, I can see myself being ready to cut back on work or retire and him just pushing the finish line out further and further for himself.

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Ramona, I have a sister who neither my SIL or us will travel with again because of the way she acted. But that is for another thread. Expectations vs. reality in your family can be a shock!

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Oh, there’s plenty of people who I like well enough but do not travel well with, even excluding financial issues!

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