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by subject4056 1387 days ago
What's worked well for us is to adopt the framing that both of our time is equally morally valuable, if not equally financially valuable. One hour of my life spend doing work for pay is worth one our of her life spent doing work for pay.

We've operationalized this as: 1. Determine how much we want/need to spend on joint things (groceries, mortgage, vacation fund, etc)., call this B for budget. 2. Look at how much we're each making, M for me and H for her. 3. Find the fraction of our money X (which is roughly speaking equivalent to fraction of hours worked in our case) Such that XM + XH = B 4. We each contribute our respective portion to a joint account, and pay for all joint things out of the joint account. 5. We each keep the rest of our money in our own accounts, to do with whatever we like.

You might need to add a couple of terms to account for different work schedules.

Knowing that we're both contributing equal _effort_ to everything makes the inequalities (I contribute more to shared stuff, but also have a bigger personal discretionary budget) not seem like such an issue.