[hmcfletch]

Like a bunch of folks are saying, the most important thing is that you are both on the same page regardless of what you choose.

As far as all joint accounts vs having individual accounts, I think if has to do with how you view marriage. Is it a single whole, or is it a joined pair of individuals.

For me personally, I view my wife and I as single team. Everything is joint (outside of a few super old accounts like other have mentioned). My income is our income. Her income is our income. The fact that I make more is irrelevant to our spending habits.

To me, having separate individual accounts, feels like you aren't committing fully to marriage and are keeping your money yours "just in case." If you are already feeling like you need a "just in case," why are you get married to begin with. I feel like separate accounts based on the income disparity would most likely lead to feelings of imbalance and resentment down the line.

I am sure there are a huge number of my biases implicit here, and there are plenty of reasonable conversations to have either way. People obviously make it work in all types of ways, so like I (and many others here have) mentioned getting on the same page is really the core of it.

[allknowingfrog]

In my mind, having a separate bank account is no different from being a physically separate human being. The taller partner will be the one who grabs more things off of high shelves. The partner with a higher salary will pay more of the bills. I don't think it's fair to characterize this arrangement as a lack of commitment.

However, my wife and I do not particularly struggle financially, in part because we do not yet have children. We both have careers and steady incomes, so our individual spending habits are not a major source of conflict. We expect to have a joint account when we become parents. This would be especially important if one of us stopped working.

[ryandrake]

> To me, having separate individual accounts, feels like you aren't committing fully to marriage and are keeping your money yours "just in case." If you are already feeling like you need a "just in case," why are you get married to begin with.

And even if that's not true, keeping track of everything separately just seems so... exhausting. Like, you pay the electricity, I'll pay the water bill, you pay 75% of the mortgage, I'll pay 80% of our vacation, but we split meals 50/50... And then you have those cases where I can afford to go to Disney World, but my spouse only has enough for Six Flags because she makes less or hasn't been saving--now what? OMG that just sounds like so much work to manage, all for what?

[darreninthenet]

I've lived with my (now) wife for 18 years and been very happily married for 14 years, and we've managed our finances exactly like this. It's just been much easier for us, and we both have very different approaches to balancing and managing our accounts and budgets... a joint account would be a nightmare for us.

We also have always had and still do have a significant disparity in salaries (I've basically more or less always earned twice what she does, even as our salaries have increased over time) and we've always managed to make it work very simply - I pay the bulk of the costs of joint things and she pays a contribution to me each month. We have some separate things (eg mobile phones, online subscriptions that only one of us uses etc) and we pay for those ourselves.

When we go out sometimes I pay, sometimes she pays, sometimes we jointly pay, it all works out in the end.

It's often said money and financial management is one of the most stressful part of a relationship... it's almost never been an issue for us and it works very well.

[marssaxman]

My wife and I work this way, but it does not feel burdensome. We each know what our recurring responsibilities are, and which sorts of expenses each account is meant to fund, so there's little to discuss beyond the occasional major purchase or unexpected repair.

The benefit is that we can each use the different habits we have developed over the years, which suit our respective temperaments and preferences, without stepping on each other's toes. I like paper bills and manual payments, while my wife prefers email and automates everything; each of us thinks the other way sounds stressful. We employ debit cards and credit cards in different ways, we have different uses for savings accounts, we track our expenses differently, we have different levels of comfort with investments and cryptocurrencies, and we even use cash differently. Compromising on a single system would leave us both confused and unhappy; it feels much easier to divvy things up equitably, then each play our parts in the styles we prefer.

[maxsilver]

> Like, you pay the electricity, I'll pay the water bill, you pay 75% of the mortgage, I'll pay 80% of our vacation, but we split meals 50/50...

Sure, it can be exhausting to keep track of everything separately and constantly re-calculate shared bills each month. But it doesn't have to be split like that. Here's a few examples I've seen that seem to work well.

Example #1: (a married couple, with equivalent incomes)

Add up rough costs once (water bill, electric, cell phone, rent or mortgages, etc), just one time. Then both commit to automatically dump maybe 5% more than half of that every month after. (So if all monthly costs add up to say, $2800/month, each person puts $1500/month into that checking account). Bills auto-pay automatically, the balance should slowly grow, if it starts to go too low, recalc to make up the difference. (kind of like how escrow works on a mortgage)

Example #2: (a married couple, with wildly different incomes)

Have a discussion about shared goals and shared debt. (Is the poorer spouse still paying off student loans? Is the wealthier spouse paying off debt from a previous marriage). Figure out a number that feels 'fair', based on cost of living and divided by share of income. And then the poorer spouse contributes this 'fair' fixed figure per month automatically, and the wealthier spouse covers the bulk of everything else. For example, if Person A makes $110k/yr, and Person B makes $40k/yr, Person B might contribute a 'fair' 50% of their take-home salary (~$1300/month) and Person A might contribute a 'fair' 50% of their take-home salary (~$3300/month) and all shared CoL expenses come out of that combined monthly pot (Groceries, Utilities, Rent+Mortgage, Car Payments + Insurance, Cell Phones, etc)

--

> And then you have those cases where I can afford to go to Disney World, but my spouse only has enough for Six Flags because she makes less or hasn't been saving--now what?

You just decide what it's worth and why, and make an agreement on how to save for it? I think your assuming the talk is exhausting because it feels like a constant fight or at least a negotiation and a math problem. But if set it up right, you only have them a couple of times a year, and if you are doing these conversations with someone you love (presumably, someone you love enough to commit to marrying them), they don't have to be that exhaustive, it's just fun banter, the way a couple might playfully banter about what to eat for dinner, or what movie to go see or such.

> OMG that just sounds like so much work to manage, all for what?

Some people have put their 110% effort into a marriage for many years (or even decades!) only for it to end in disaster anyway. You can fully commit to a marriage, and also think people can change over time. It's loving to help people feel safe and secure, even from someone who might be your own partner. Especially for folks who've gone through a divorce already, safety and security in any possible scenario (even the worst one) can feel very loving too.

It only takes one time of being "committed fully to marriage" and having it end in divorce anyway, before you realize it's crazy to pretend that's never a possibility.

[frumper]

If you're communicating all of those things, then how is it better to bother doing the splitting?

[marssaxman]

> As far as all joint accounts vs having individual accounts, I think if has to do with how you view marriage. Is it a single whole, or is it a joined pair of individuals.

Your point is a good one, and I agree with your overall thrust; but if you'll permit a deeply nerdy analogy, we can model this as a concurrency problem. Is it better for two threads of a single process to manage access to shared resources via mutexes and shared memory, or by message-passing between separate arenas? Naturally, we have to say that "it depends".

[fallinghawks]

> If you are already feeling like you need a "just in case," why are you get married to begin with.

Because people change, and sometimes those changes lead to financial troubles. One spouse starts making risky investments, or spends joint money in an inequitable manner. Maybe separation happens and one spouse wants to move out, but if the money is gone, they're stuck.

[2rsf]

> For me personally, I view my wife and I as single team

We do the same, but I can see how late marriages might influence this decision

[em-bee]

To me, having separate individual accounts, feels like you aren't committing fully to marriage and are keeping your money yours "just in case."

in china, the account that receives your salary must be at the same bank that the employer uses because payroll is usually done with a system provided by the banks (at least that was the case in my company) so a joint account would not have been possible.

we also had bank accounts by function. we created a separate bank account for our insurance where they could automatically withdraw the payments. i don't remember if there was a specific reason for that though.

and i created a separate account for online purchases that i deliberately kept at a low balance to reduce the risk of fraud when sharing banking information online.

and my wife has accumulated a few more bank accounts over time, i guess in part because of different employers, or i have no idea. i learned the pin for most of them.

so i don't think it matters. what matters is how you view the ownership of the money in the accounts. in our case we simply added up our combined account balances as the money we had available. and money was spent from any account as was convenient except the accounts for a specific purpose. we never argued over whose money it was, but only sometimes over the necessity of an expense.