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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've been married 31 years. We have two kids, both in their 20s and through college. We were students when we got married and had no money. In fact, we had a negative net worth (student loans). We merged our checking accounts a couple months before we got married because together we could meet the minimum balance for free checking and separately we could not. I have never regretted merging our finances.

We were quite poor in the beginning and now we are financially very comfortable. Early on, when the kids were little and I worked part time, my husband made more money than I did. In the past 10 years or so my career has taken off and I make significantly more money than he does. It all evens out. Although our finances are merged, neither of us begrudges the other spending money on things that we would never buy. We keep enough money in our checking account to handle occasional splurges of a hundred dollars or so. If one of us wants to buy something more than that we discuss it to make sure that our cash flow can handle it or we jointly decide that it is something that we want to take money from savings to cover. We don't fight about money but we do discuss it.

I can see how keeping finances separate could work, but if you do that I think that it is important to keep in mind joint goals for the future. Presumably you both want to retire one day. What happens if one of you saves up a lot of money for retirement and the other does not? By merging our finances we were forced to discuss things like what percentage of our salaries we want to save. If you keep your finances separate, I think that you still need to discuss these issues unless one of you is willing to watch the other one suffer in old age. [/quote]

OP here.  I think with respect to retirement we'd develop a mutually agreeable target savings plan for 401k contributions.  I'm not suggesting my approach completely eliminates discussion of how we spend our individual money because if we have kids we still have to be prepared for either one of us to assume a larger share of the family unit needs due to sickness, loss of employment, etc. so to some degree we'll still need to discuss large purchases from our individual accounts.[/quote]

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