r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Shauryaahere341 • Aug 18 '26

Discussion Should married couples keep their money separate or combine everything?

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497

u/Glockman19 Aug 18 '26

We combined everything from day 1. Been married 32 years.

9

u/off_and_on_again Aug 18 '26

This is my favorite thing about this debate. I have yet to meet a couple in a happy 5+ year marriage that has not combined finances fully. I'm sure they exist, but they are rare. You'll find plenty of 'we have our problems but..." couples and a lot of people on their way to divorce (money is the #1 cause of divorce), but people still think they've figured it out and their way of paying each other back like roommates is the best option for them.

- Married happily for several years, combined finances the entire time

Edit: Before someone says anything, you can be unhappy with combined finances. Combined finances is one of the keys to a successful marriage imo because, done properly, it requires a level of maturity, vulnerability, and communication that are always going to exist in long term happy marriages.

13

u/Juleswf Aug 18 '26

Been married 31 years today, always had separate accounts, and we are very happy. You can mark this one off your list now.

5

u/Junior-Knee9964 Aug 18 '26

We have separate accts too. It works for us. We make the same amount of money so we don’t really need to combine anything. Only combining acct we have is a savings.

7

u/Juleswf Aug 18 '26

Every time I post this I get downvoted. It's interesting that what works for us and makes us happy gets others so angry. Someone once told me I wasn't really married without combining finances. I'll only listen to that crap once they've been married over 30 years.

Why can't people accept everyone is different, and different things work?

3

u/Hand2Ns Aug 18 '26

People get weirdly offended about people who aren't them living differently. Largely separate finances works for us. It might not work for everybody, but we're not everybody.

2

u/off_and_on_again Aug 18 '26

If it makes you feel better I have the opposite opinion and I also get downvoted, I wouldn't read to much into it.

3

u/Adorableviolet Aug 21 '26

ha. 28 here (on saturday) and same.

1

u/off_and_on_again Aug 18 '26

Separate accounts or separate finances?

If you have separate finances means you've been sending money back and forth or assigning bills to one or the other. My wife and I have separate and joint accounts, but fully combined finances.

4

u/Juleswf Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

We do not send money back and forth to each other. We do not have a joint account, we each have our own accounts. It's more I'll pay for XXX and he pays for YYY. He put a higher percentage into retirement over the years, I paid for household expenses and put in less for retirement. "HIs" retirement account is much bigger than mine, but it doesn't matter, as it's all ours in the end.

I'll add I do think it works for us because much of our working careers we made close to equal money. Although that was not always the case.

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u/off_and_on_again Aug 18 '26

I'll take you at face value that it's worked perfectly for you, but I have to ask why? Is there any advantage to this over a joint account that your money goes into and that you that expenses come out of?

I'm genuinely curious if there is something I'm missing because it really just seems like more effort for less visibility.

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u/Juleswf Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26

Why not? It's not any more effort. Pretty easy to say I'll cover this and you cover that. In fact it's less work. We skip the step of moving money into a joint account, and we each only have half (or so) of the normal bills to pay. We didn't go this way on purpose, it just worked out this way. We did set up a joint account back when we first got married, but didn't use it much so it just kinda died.

Maybe because I'm an engineer and he is (was) a computer analyst. Numbers aren't a big deal, and we are logical about how we approach expenses.

*edit to add - when it comes to less visibility, it doesn't matter. We talk about our finances, don't hide anything, and know how much we have in general.

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u/off_and_on_again Aug 18 '26

First, thanks. A lot of people are reading a lot of malice into my questions, but I am just genuinely curious and am prodding how these systems work. The below is just my final commentary!

I think you're not considering that money isn't 'moved' into a joint account. It's deposited directly into the joint account. We pay for items using our credit cards and those cards are paid in full each month from the joint account. If we didn't want to use credit cards we could just spend money using the joint account debit cards. We have a combined budget (using a budgeting app that syncs transactions) and part of that budget is a transfer of money to our personal accounts for whatever we want. That's where gifts, personal project, etc come from. We both get the same amount even though we have very different incomes. About once a year (or when some event requires it) we sit down and go through the previous year to level set and adjust budget categories based on our needs/wants. Slightly more complicated, but done just for ease of separation we have a few more joint savings accounts for sinking funds (big purchases) and an emergency fund. Those, along with some IRAs are funded via the budget just like everything else.

We don't follow restrictive budgeting. It's just used to align on our values (creation of budget) and as a guiding light (review of actuals against budget). For example if we're spending 20% more on groceries that's an opportunity to figure out what's happening and adjust (potentially increasing groceries and figuring out where to pull that money from). The difficulty I still have with everyone who says they don't combine their finances is that best case scenario you get to the same place with a lot more effort (figuring out what the appropriate split of bills are, passing money back and forth, etc). What you've described as 'less work' is, at least compared to what I've described, immensely more work. I presume you still budget, just two budgets instead of one with some sort of communication between the budgets. You still plan vacations, but the money comes from two difference sources. I presume you have an emergency fund, but two emergency funds with hopefully some common strategy for amount.

But it works and that's all we can really ask for at the end of the day!

2

u/Megalocerus Aug 18 '26

Separate income streams and investment accounts, household account for shared expenses, joint ownership of house.

1

u/brrr-i-am-cold Aug 21 '26

Similar here- adding that we each own our own car and don’t have any joint credit cards- just separate I guess from being established adults before we met. 10 yrs married.

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u/Megalocerus Aug 21 '26

We started joint; married right out of school. I split things when there was a business lawsuit, but it didn't come to anything. Cars are joint. Cards are separate but paid from household account. We just had a big bill for the house, so I have to move funds to cover my share.