Because for the one-time very brief effort of combining your finances you save a lifetime of effort of splitting up expenses.
My husband and I never ever discuss who is going to pay for dinner. It simply could not matter less who puts dinner on our joint credit card. Usually he pays, I think because there’s some societal expectation that the man should pay, but in point of fact it makes absolutely no difference.
There’s no discussion of how to split anything… it is already predetermined that the split is 100% from our joint account.
I spent 30 minutes opening our joint accounts and I’ve never had to debate or even consider who should pay for what since.
When we made within $100 of the same pay, everything was 100% joint. When I made over 5x his income it was 100% joint. When I wasn’t working and he was making bank it was 100% joint, now that we’re both working but he makes a lot more it’s 100% joint.
We’ve never had to consider “gee, when your income dropped from the low $100s to the high teens you probably can’t afford as much of the mortgage payment as you used to… what’s a reasonable way to split that now?
Also, when he wanted to do a major career change that involved enduring some short-term pain for some long-term gain… I’m not sure he would have taken the risk (and it was definitely a risk… we didn’t know when or even if he would land his dream job and he was giving up a cushy job with decent pay and great benefits) if he’d really had to adjust to living on ~$19K a year, even temporarily.
He wasn’t comfortable burning through savings, and he would’ve been burning through his savings pretty fast even if I covered 100% of joint expenses and he only had to pay for his solo expenses.
But when it was joint then we had a conversation about whether we wanted to take the risk and make the short-term sacrifice, decided the risk was worth it and likely to pay off, and took the plunge.
He’d be the first to tell you that he never would’ve taken that risk if he didn’t have my actuary salary to fall back on… and my confidence in our ability to financially weather the storm.
The fact that it’s a discussion that even needs to occur in the first place… even if you can be confident it goes well… is what sounds like a hassle to me. It’s something I don’t have to think about.
If they spend less under separate accounts because they have less available to them to spend, then separate accounts would be helpful for that particular person. That’s what I was envisioning.
If their spending is unaffected then sure, separate accounts would be the same as joint or worse if they rack up tons of credit card interest and late fees and such.
This sentence is hard to compute. In my experience kids usually make people more responsible, not less.
My first inclination in reading it is to assume that you simply didn’t understand just how expensive the kids truly were.
But you seem like a reasonable person and I wasn’t there so I’m also inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Can you say more about how you arrived at this conclusion?
Did she start spending more on herself than she did before the kids?
Did you have an expectation that she would cut back on her personal spending now that there are additional mouths to feed and she actually spent (more or less) the same?
Was there a change in the family’s income? I would imagine that the increase in costs that a baby brings coupled with the decrease in income from one spouse working less or not at all would be a tough pill for a lot of families to swallow.
Was there something that triggered the change? Mommy & Me group made up of more affluent mommies who spent more than her old friends?
How were expectations regarding increased expenses changes in personal spending and possibly decreased income discussed? Was there agreement? True buy-in or reluctant “ok, FINE ”???
I mean, if you’re going to be bailing each other out and giving each other money anyway then to some extent it’s not truly separate… it’s just joint accounts where some of the accounts have extra hoops to jump through to access the money.
I guess my husband and I almost have that.
His name is on our high-yield savings account (they both are… fully joint), but I doubt he even knows which bank it’s at. Not because I don’t tell him, but because he doesn’t keep track of stuff like that.
If I was hit by a bus tomorrow he’d probably have to wait for the quarterly statement to come in the mail before he’d know how to get to the money even though he has full legal access to it.
But he chooses not to worry about that stuff and outsources the money management to me. He doesn’t like doing it anyway. He’s not a like me. Another advantage of joint accounts.
The advantage is in having a trustworthy partner with whom you can collaborate and build the life you mutually want. Not in whose name is on what bank accounts. Ffs
like me. Another advantage of joint accounts.
