How do you make separate finances work?

[Anonymous]

DH refuses to join our finances for reasons I don't want to discuss on a public forum. Everything is separate. I pay certain bills, he pays certain bills and this was fine with me until I "mommy tracked" which decreased my income significantly. This is our arrangement:

I pay:
Childcare
Electricity
Cable
My student loans
Baby's diapers and other odds and ends

He pays:
Mortgage (modest)
Car payment
Health insurance
Groceries

This arrangement sounds fair on paper but not when you consider that I literally earn 1/5 of what he does at this point. I asked him to contribute half towards childcare expenses but he balked at the idea. Is there a way that I can make the separate finances more fair or do I just suck this up?

If you have separate finances, what works for you?

[Anonymous]

You need marriage counselling. This is not about money.

[Anonymous]

Never heard of anything like this.

[Anonymous]

We have separate finances, broken down like this:

Him:
Child support ($36,000 a year)
His car
70% of the mortgage

Me:
Daycare/tuition for our child ($20,000)
My car
30% of the mortgage
All utilities

We split house repairs depending on cash flow any given month. We both contribute to savings and retirement based on income.

My husband makes about 10% more than me. He contributes a bit more than I do to common expenses.If he made significantly more, he'd pay significantly more as well. Other than kid expenses, it's pretty proportionate.

[Anonymous]

The only way to make it work is have 3 accounts, joint that pays all the common household expenses and 2 for each persons spending money. If he wants to be a Dick you could blindly agree to an amount for you to have deposited

[Anonymous]

We never got a joint checking account--and we divide our expenses a lot like you do. There's really no reason, just kinda works for us. I like feeling like I have "my" money that I can spend how I wish, and vice versa (though I'd never make a huge purchase without running it by him). I also like that when I buy DH a gift, I'm not pulling from his account. But it's all semantics: I consider both accounts to be ours, and if my acct was low, he'd just write me a check. We also have a joint savings acct that we dump money into whenever. I think if you do things this way, your budget should give you both the same amount of spending money, and savings at the end of the month, if that makes sense. So sounds like DH should be willing to pay more of the bills now that your salary is lower.

[Anonymous]

Separate finances are VERY different than separate checking accounts which is what we have. We have joint finances. What you have doesn't sound workable because it sounds "tit for tat" to me.

We divide the major expenses - mortgage and daycare - out of necessity (we each make about half our HHI) but have separate checking accounts so we don't have to run every purchase by each other to balance the account.

[Anonymous]

Don't have separate finances, but the thing that seems fair if you do is each contributing the same percentage of income to a joint account from which all family bills get paid. Even still, that will mean that the lower wage earner, in your case you because you mommy tracked, has less income to save or spend for fun. GL OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Separate finances are VERY different than separate checking accounts which is what we have. We have joint finances. What you have doesn't sound workable because it sounds "tit for tat" to me.

We divide the major expenses - mortgage and daycare - out of necessity (we each make about half our HHI) but have separate checking accounts so we don't have to run every purchase by each other to balance the account.

I agree. I know people who kept separate checking accounts but they still split all the bills fairly.

[Anonymous]

My sister and her husband had an arrangement similar to OP--it is a significant factor in what will soon be an ugly divorce. Are you roommates or spouses/partners?

[Anonymous]

When I lived with my long term boyfriend we had a joint account where we paid household expenses as well as our vacation fund etc. We agreed in advance on how much we needed to deposit each month based on how much we made (I made more at the time, so contributed slighty more). When we broke up, I didn't think this contributed to it.

[Anonymous]

My sister and her husband had an arrangement similar to OP--it is a significant factor in what will soon be an ugly divorce. Are you roommates or spouses/partners?

ITA. I can't imagine living like that. We have one checking account and one savings account. Both of our names are on each. We don't divide up our bills and assign percentages. We are married. We are a team. There is no "his money" or "my money". It's our money.

[Anonymous]

Joint account for all HH bills and joint savings account. We each have our own individual accounts. We put into joint account and joint savings account a percentage based on salaries. We added up bills, figured out he makes 2/3 what I do, so we applied percentages to total bills. It is all our money but we each have control of the remaining portions. I use mine for my student loans, medical expenses, personal expenses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don't have separate finances, but the thing that seems fair if you do is each contributing the same percentage of income to a joint account from which all family bills get paid. Even still, that will mean that the lower wage earner, in your case you because you mommy tracked, has less income to save or spend for fun. GL OP.

This is what we do. We have 3 accounts. We each contribute about 60% to the joint house account and that coves all the joint bills like mortgage utilities, etc. the rest goes into our own personal accounts which covers our own costs and includes our cell phones, credit cards, clothes shopping . we make about the same so it works out. We have one house credit card we use for groceries and to pay for when we go out to dinner etc. but we didn't always. When I made more than he, we didn't have that household cc and I would usually cover dinners out or things like that. But it's better the way we now do it.

I also agree wih the pp that suggested counseling because there's a bigger issue here than money.

[Anonymous]

I agree that this isn't about money.

When we moved in together, we established a joint account from which we paid all common expenses, including fun things. Medical expenses and the like came out of our individual accounts. The amount we deposited was based on percentage of salary and I contributed significantly more. When it was clear we were on the path to marriage, we changed it so that we deposited all our money in there except for $X which remained in our individual accounts. We had the same amount of money to spend on whatever we wanted. We defined in advance what came out of which account. Things like lunch at work, etc. definitely came out of individual accounts. I still make signficantly more than DH. If you're in a marriage, it seems to me that you should both have the same amount of 'fun' money. One spouse shouldn't be limited because he/she makes less than the other. It's a marriage, after all.