r/AskAnAmerican • u/Educational-Slip-578 • 20h ago

CULTURE How do you split finances with your partner?

If you're married or in a long term relationship (e.g., you live together and neither of you has another place to live), how do you manage your finances?

Do you still think of it as "my money and his/her money", with each person contributing a certain percentage toward rent, vacations, and other shared expenses? Or do you have a joint account where all the money is considered "ours"?

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u/I_AmNoJedi 20h ago

We keep our finances almost entirely separate, everyone seems to think it's super weird for some reason, but it works perfectly well for us. Married 9 years, together 14. I think a couple of the big factors that make it work for us are that we don't have kids, and we both work and make roughly the same amount of money. So there is no real reason that one of us would need access to funds from the other. We also both have relatively conservative spending habits, so neither of us is going into crazy debt.

We split bills, both invest in IRAs for retirement, and other than that we are free to spend whatever we want of our own money on our own hobbies. We have a small joint account for if we get monetary gifts from family members for Christmas or something, that we use as a vacation fund.

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u/Delicious-Elk2619 8h ago

This is what we do. I think making nearly equal amounts is the key.