[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.