[nonameiguess]

Others have mentioned this, but you can try to treat things as separate if you want, but legally, they are not separate. Marital property is 50/50 and that includes anything either of you earn while married.

Personally, I would absolutely not want to try and be an accounting minutiae expert in my marriage. The point of making a good amount of money is not worrying about money. I make pretty close to triple what my wife makes right now, but that wasn't always the case and certainly isn't guaranteed to always be the case. The point of marriage is you're a single decision-making unit. It's a lifetime commitment. You weather the highs and lows and buffer for each other to make it easier and more pleasant than it would be if you were single. I had a really bad spine injury 8 years ago, and there was a period of nearly 6 months that I couldn't work at all. Without my wife, I couldn't have even put my shoes on, and I was earning zero for at least a short period of time due to being young and stupid and thinking independent contractor with no disability insurance was a fine thing. Well, guess what has happened since then? My wife has a condition that has put her in the ICU twice in the intervening years, and has had to switch jobs and go through a brief period of unemployment for the same reason. She didn't need to worry about money either during that time specifically because we're a single economic unit and bad things that happen to us individually don't need to happen to us together.

The way I treat making more money than her is both of us deposit paychecks into a single shared account. Most of what goes in there ends up in other accounts, either for retirement or mostly into brokerage accounts to invest what is over the limit for tax protected retirement accounts. Neither one of us really touches that, but it doesn't matter. Both names are authorized to withdraw if we wanted to. It's community property legally. At some point, one of us is going to die before the other. Given her medical profile, I'm likely to outlast her, but if I die first, am I gonna feel cheated that my wife gets a nice life because of all my work? Isn't that the point of work? To make things better for your family, not just for yourself?