Yours, Mine and Ours or All Together Now?

My Fiancee and I have had this discussion several times.  She sides with "yours, mine and ours" while I am in the camp of "all together now."  We do not live together now, and only recently got engaged.  So, naturally, our finances are completely separate right now.  Well, except that we do have a joint brokerage account so that we can buy some favorite stocks together.  We have agreed to use that account as our wedding fund.  I know, from a time horizon standpoint it's a bad idea.  That's alright, we're okay with the risk.

When it comes to basics such as credit cards and checking accounts, I feel that family money is family money.  When we are married, everything should go into one account and all savings, bills and purchases should come from that same pot.  She doesn't agree.

She feels that we should retain some amount of autonomy in our spending and budgeting.  She believes that most of our paychecks should go into a joint account to pay household and joint expenses, but we should each have "my money" accounts.  These would be the accounts from which gifts for each other may be purchased, large purchases may be made without convening a household meeting and to cover our own day to day personal stuff like lunches, Starbucks or manicures.

Now, I'm not saying that I can't be swayed.  What I'm patently against is a clear division of money, such that we're saying, "okay, you're share of electric comes out to $62.79, and half of the cable bill is $37.50" like we're roommates or something.  I also want to avoid any discussion of "well, you make 30% more than I, so you're share of the mortgage will be..."  But I don't think that's what she's suggesting.  We actually haven't talked about this since our engagement.  I suppose a conversation we should have.

Make Love not Debt recently shared that they are at the one year anniversary of combining income, assets and debts.  Seems to have gone well for them.  At firsts I thought, "Victory!  They did what I want to do, and it has worked out well."  However, as I continued to read the post, I found that they continued to maintain a small "allowance" account for each to spend as they saw fit, like on gifts, lunches and manicures...  Hmmm....  Beginning to sound more like my Fiancee's way than mine.

As I mentioned before, I am reading Your Money and Your Man, by Michelle Singletary.  And yes, I realize that it is meant for women.  I wanted to read a relationship and money book from the woman's perspective.  Although much of Michelle's advice early in the book makes you wonder, "dang, she must have gotten burned badly," she is adamantly opposed to separate accounts.  It's planning to fail, she argues.  It's planning your exit.  That's how I felt.  Although I'm now on the fence.

Here's where separate accounts do not work.  See, right now it works fine because we both work, and the differential in our incomes is not significant.  But let's say one of us wanted to take a year off to go back to school.  Or one of us starts our own business, gets laid off or decides to take some time off to be home with the kids.  I think by always having joint accounts, and always allowing all money to be co-mingled, it becomes less of an issue of one pulling the weight for the other.  And more just, "okay, we have to make do on less for a while."  We're a family.  That's just how I see it.

What do you think?

Comments

[Chitowngirl]

I love this post and I can't wait to hear other comments. I have absolutely no idea what is best but I do agree that keen issues are income disparities and the desire not to split everything like roommates...this does not work from my “personal” experience. =) I am more in your camp. I believe in the "our" concept more. My position was a bit swayed by the same post from Make Love, Not Debt but the question is...How do you decide the right amount of personal spending money?

[Him (Make Love, Not Debt)]

I don't think that our measly $75 allowance per pay check is necessarily "setting us up to fail." I mean, where can you really escape for that amount of money?

We have our personal allowance account because, let's face it, no matter how well matched a couple is, it is IMPOSSIBLE to agree on everything. Our individual accounts are an escape from guilt from each other. She can by her girlie stuff like shoes or handbags and I can buy stuff like Transformers or booze; if we have no money, we only have ourselves to blame. And we can blow our allowance knowing that it isn't going to impede our combined financial goals.

[TADollar]

My husband and I have been married for almost 3 years now, but we lived together for 3 years prior to our marriage. I wrote about how using Quicken promoted an early transparency about our spending and savings goals. Highly recommend you divulge all financial info prior to marriage. Now we have separate and joint checking accounts, but we do not split up our expenses (like your example about the cable bill). Usually, our paychecks are deposited in our respective accounts and then we transfer money to our joint account to cover all monthly expenses. So the expenses are paid from one pot. While this arrangement has worked out well for us, lately it's felt a bit redundant. I think eventually we may consolidate into one joint checking account. I suggest you try the joint/separate accounts and see what works for you.

[c]

I am also a member of the "ours" camp. My husband and I have one checking account, and two savings accounts together. The only things that are separate are our retirement accounts, for obvious reasons. Like our friends at Make Love Not Debt, we do have an allowance for the same reasons they state above. We each get $100 a paycheck to spend or save how we like. My allowance usually goes toward clothes while my husband's usually goes to dinners out after we've used all of our entertainment $ for the month, or DVD's. The point for us is to be working toward our financial goals together, which we are doing. The biggest reason we instituted the allowance system was because I was always justifying every purchase to him, which drove him crazy (I have no idea why I did that--I guess I just felt like it was all "our" money, he should know where every penny went). I am in charge of the household finances and once a month or so we sit down together and look at everything so we're on the same page. We have never had an argument about money, so I think it works great.

However...having said that, I don't think it's a matter of one way being better than the other. The trick is finding out which way works best for you. I have friends and coworkers who do the separate thing, and they love it. Finding a system that makes you both happy is all that really matters.

[Amanda]

We are doing the "Yours, Mine and Ours" plan. I think it's good to start out, especially if one person is resistant to combine all finances at once. Everyone is different and the minute you combine everything, these differences will become all too clear. However, I think it is really important for committed couples to share a savings plan. Having a joint checking account for shared expenses also makes life much easier.

[Frugal Homemaker]

We have "ours"...

BUT-

We each have a credit card and a checking account in our own name, only to keep some established credit seperate. If something were to happen to my husband, (or vice versa) I wanted to have something in my own name so I would have credit.

You can have joint accounts and an allowence. Just take it out in cash each week (or month, or whatever.)

For my personal situation, I think having seperate accounts would get tedious and be hard to balance. But everybody is different and should consider their own personal style when deciding what to do.

[contrary1]

Hmmm.....not agreeing and not yet married. Time for a serious look at financial differences.

[Eileen Denz]

My financee and I are doing the "Yours, Mine, and Ours" deal. We are doing it because we both have prior debts (student loans for both, and credit card for him) that we don't feel it the responsibility of the other person to pay. Also, I tend to be much more stingy than he is and it makes for peace of mind and house. We basically totalled up what all of our combinded spending and saving is and split that according to our salaries (I have a full time job and he's a PhD student so there's a large differential).
I think that eventually we might combine them, but this works out well in the beginning. I would suggest that you start out with "Yours, Mine, and Ours" just to get used to how you are each used to living and making purchasing decisions.
And always keep things in both names when possible - esp. cars and mortgage, as well as one credit card - that way if something happens you don't end up with crappy credit just because it was all in one name.

[lamoneyguy]

Wow! lots of great comments. I appreciate everyone's perspective and experiences. I think I agree that at least starting out with the "yours, mine, ours" method makes sense. We do handle things differently (not one better than the other, just different methods), and merging overnight may be a bit too much for both of us to handle. Couple of specific notes:

Him: I hope you didn't take what I wrote to mean that I meant that you specifically are setting yourself up for failure. Not at all, I was just sharing the way in which Michelle Singletary wrote in her book.

Contrary1: Not sure what you mean. Of course we have differences, married or not. Not something we fight over.

Thanks again, and anyone else who wants to sound off, I would be grateful.

[Sep]

For us what's worked is having our checks deposited into a joint account and having a pre-determined amount transferred from the joint account into our individual accounts. We've had times when one of us wasn't earning as much as the other like when my husband was going through the immigration process and not allowed to work or when I went back to school and this system still allowed us to have some discretionary funds that could be adjusted to fit our current circumstances.

It's also avoided a bunch of money arguments. For instance my husband and I both agree that we *should* bring lunches from home. However one of us is not very good at doing so. By agreeing on a set amount that each of us is allowed to spend on lunch each week and having that amount come out of our 'allowance' it avoids a fight about how much is being spent on lunches. If I don't see it, it doesn't matter to me that he's blown his lunch budget before Wednesday.

I would go nuts if it came down to splitting the bills to the penny and equally if I never had any money that I could spend at my sole discretion. I'd been managing my own finances for 10 years before we married and it would feel very odd to me to suddenly have no money that I could spend without justifying each purchase.

-- Sep

[Zelda]

My husband of 3 years (plus living together for 2 years) and I are strictly in the "Yours/Mine" camp. We both walked into our relationship with significant student loan debt, but we had very different attitudes about how to deal with it. I whored myself to "The Man" and paid it all off; he started a career (coaching football) that he loves but that barely pays anything. I'm happy that he's found something so fulfilling, but would resent him if I had to continue working a job I hated to subsidize his passion. So we keep our money separate and split our expenses (which we've kept low) monthly. (I'm saving my excess salary to subsidize taking a year off to find my bliss.) We make joint decisions/purchases but we're each responsible for ensuring that whatever we do fits our respective budgets. So far its worked very well. (We have no desire to have children; I can see how kids would make this kind of set up difficult.)

[Tschepsit]

My wife and I combined all of our income/assets from the start, but we knew that she would eventually quit to stay home with kids. Doing things this way may cause a little bit of strife at first as you each adjust your spending habits to accomodate the other person, but I really like how it has worked out in the long run. I've also known at least two marriages that failed in large part because of separate accounts - by the time one spouse found out the other was spending his/her account on gambling, drugs, one-night stands, etc, they had already grown too far apart to recover. For stuff like that, the earlier you blow things out in the open and have a confrontation about it, the better your chances of getting through it together (except maybe the one-night stands thing, for me that's a one-time "it's over" offense).

In any case, my opinion is that it helps you grow together and enforces common goals if you keep the bulk of your money in one pot. I don't think Him & Her's allowance system detracts from this at all, so that may be a good way to go.

[Susan]

My husband and I did the "all one pot" approach, and it's worked wonderfully. The thing that always puzzles me about the "allowance" approach is that I've always assumed the purchases most couples argue over are large ones -- should we landscape the backyard or buy some new furniture? -- and not the ones that fit into a $100/month allowance. I mean, my husband and I would never argue with each other over a new pair of shoes that the other has decided they need/want. But maybe things are easier for us because we aren't struggling and we share similar spending habits.