A couple of weeks ago, in one of my money diaries, I off-handedly touched on the division of finances between myself and my husband. I was asking if readers wanted me to exclude all household expenses, which seem less “fun” than the kind of frivolous, discretionary spending I’ve somehow made my hallmark, and in any case, are not “mine” but, rather “ours” – but then I pointed out that, as our finances are shared, it was kind of a moot point.
It got me thinking about how couples divide their finances, and why – and is there a “better” or “best” way, anyway?
My Mother is a staunch advocate of kind of… assimilating into a marriage. A married couple become one entity; their money is theirs to share, like everything else they own.
She’s kind of an extremist about it, actually – she frequently laments the fact that people “these days” have hobbies and friendships and things they do that don’t involve their spouses.
“I just don’t know,” she’ll say – and she’s not just rabble-rousing, she really doesn’t know – “why, if you’re married, you wouldn’t want to do everything together?”
Anyway, you can kind of get a feel for how I was brought up, at least in terms of how marriage is viewed as very much a sharing, or a division, of life in all of its aspects. (Except housework, a burden that is somehow hers to bear alone.)
When Brandin and I got married, then, I went into things assuming that we would share everything, and I was lucky that he assumed the same thing. He had previously been married, and subsequently divorced, and that was how they had managed their finances, too, although I believe they kept their own bank accounts.
As did we, incidentally; my pay – from Substack, the podcast Patreon and freelance jobs that I do – goes into “my” bank account, and his goes into “his”, but we both have access, via online banking, to each other’s accounts, so we freely transfer money from one to the other, as needed.
We each transfer most of our wages into a shared account that we use to pay our mortgage and bills and so on, and we pay for groceries on a Walmart credit card that we pay monthly using a combination of both of our monies. It’s kind of messy, but it works for us.
There’s no policing of one another’s spending (although I frequently feel as though there should be; Brandin doesn’t even read my money diaries any more, claiming that they “stressed him out” too much), although we did, at one stage, agree to run it past one another if we were going to spend more than $150 on any one item, an agreement that we both seemed to immediately decide to ignore.
“Married couples who manage their finances together may love each other longer.” – Jenny Olson, Indiana University Kelley School of Business
And as it happens, we’re doing something right! Research from the Indiana University Kelley School of Business has led to the conclusion that “married couples who manage their finances together may love each other longer.”
“Those who had merged accounts reported higher levels of communality within their marriage compared to people with separate accounts, or even those who partially merged their finances,” said Jenny Olson, assistant professor of marketing at Kelley. “They frequently told us they felt more like they were ‘in this together.’”
My mum was obviously on to something, but her logic may not have its roots in romance as much as it has in pragmatics; in the 1970s and 1980s, keeping money separate was not only considered a bad omen for a marriage, but it was also just… nonsensical, seeing as men vastly out-earned women (even more than they do now), and a massive proportion of women left the workplace when they married (until the 1970s it was the norm for women to have to leave their jobs once they were wed; in many cases, they weren’t permitted to continue working).
It’s fair to say that things have changed in the 50 years since (!!! I refuse to believe this maths; the 1970s were a mere 30 years ago), as the percentage of women whose earnings are equal to those of their husbands has been steadily increasing. Data from the Pew Research Center shows that, in 29% of same-sex marriages today, the husband and wife’s earnings are the same (up from 11% in 1972).
To be clear, though: in 55% of marriages, the man is the sole breadwinner, with just 16% of marriages seeing the woman earning more, and women still do the lion’s share of both caregiving and housework.
Whatever about what’s best for a happy marriage, though, what about what happens afterwards? A whopping 50% of marriages in the US end in divorce, and while the figure is just 15% in Ireland, Ireland saw a massive 35% increase in divorce rates in the six years from 2015 to 2021. And while a divorce will see you separating and dividing your assets, if it’s an acrimonious breakup, you would probably be wise to have access to some cash that is not in any way tied to your ex.
Of course, any thinking about how couples divide – and share – their money in their relationships got me feeling very nosy, and I decided to quiz a few couples I know on how they go about things. Here are a few of their responses.
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