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Love & Money

Love & Money

Say I do, and chances are you’ll be saying I do to a whole lot of money-related changes as well. Many people choose to combine their finances, sometimes without even considering that there are other options.

I know that’s what happened when my ex and I got married. We went down after the wedding and opened up a joint checking account. Then we began funding it with our checks, and paying our bills from that account.

The only thing is, even though we’d talked about money and whether we would have enough to pay for things, we didn’t actually have any experience in doing so. We had trouble working together. Receipts would not get entered, money would be spent that we didn’t have, we racked up overdraft fees, etc.

It was a mess.

So when my husband and I got together, we decided we would do things differently. We set up a joint account for certain specified household bills, and then kept individual accounts for our individual bills and most of our spending money.

We decided that the joint account would fund our house payment, homeowner’s insurance, electricity, phone, internet, water, groceries, and a small amount of entertainment. Later we added some travel and an appliance replacement fund to the list.

This has worked out great for us.

At first I thought it was because of how we’d set up the accounts, but I’ve realized recently that that is not the case.

The REAL difference is that we both approach money very, very similarly. We don’t have exactly the same opinions about everything money-related, but we’re very close on most of them.

We follow through on what we say we’ll do, we don’t do things that we haven’t agreed to do, and we’re willing to compromise sometimes.

That’s the really important part of combining financial lives: not where you put your money, but how you act in regard to it and in regard to each other.

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  • I agree, during my first marriage my wife would spend until the account was zero. She just had to spend. What we ended up doing was getting separate accounts, and each time she got paid she would put a portion of her pay in my account. I paid all the bills and tried to save. In hers, it went to zero every month.

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