To think that your partner steps up financially when you are on mat leave (SMP)

[Teacherprebaby]

Just that really, how did couples split the finances during mat leave? I'm talking mortgage repayments, bills etc.

Who owns the house?

We aren't married and at mat leave time had a same fun money policy so we each kept back the same amount and put rest in joint account to cover mortgage, bills etc. So yes he paid a lot more during mat leave whereas L on mat leave 2 he was in different job earning way less and sometimes my mat pay was the higher wage

By the time we had our first child we had been married for nearly a decade and had had all money in the joint account for all that time. So using the joint account for personal spends was just the same as always. I think that this made it easier.

Old fashioned?
I think you are not quite getting the extent to which your life and ability to work will be affected by having a child.

Marriage is not old fashioned. It is an economic structure that is meant to protect the party in a partnership that gets affected by sacrifices that child rearing requires.

If marriage is old-fashioned - why are you here asking about SMP vs bills? Why is it not 50/50 - he takes paternity/you work, then you switch? Why are you following the ‘old fashioned idea that a mother stays with a child… Etc.

Get married. You seem to have some sort of misguided idea of ‘independence’ that will potentially disadvantage you and your child if the relationship does not work out.
and its a 50% chance of that…

Can’t you just put all your wages into the joint account? Direct debits can then be set up from there as well as direct debits to your savings account. That way you can both just share money and use the joint account. That’s what we did both before and after marriage.

How about...

• get married
• pool resources
• adopt a "we are a team and we are in this together" approach.

Very old fashioned admittedly, but sensible for most women who are not independently wealthy. (If you are independently wealthy, you may want to take legal advice..)

It might be old fashioned but...
If you are too unwell to make decisions about your child after giving birth... the hospital will need to find your parents because your 'partner' will not be legally able to make any decisions.
Just one of a huge number of reasons why the legal institution of marriage exists.

You don't need to "ask". It's now all family money. And please pay heed to those advising marriage. It's not about "old-fashioned". You are so vulnerable now, and in the coming years. Marriage is your financial protection. Weddings are about romance, marriage is about making sure you're looked after at your most vulnerable. (Read any number of threads on here from unmarried women who have been screwed over, with no recourse.)

Why are you on Mat leave? To recover from giving birth and to care for/bond with the child that you produced together. Of course he should be taking on more of the financial burden. I am always shocked when I hear of new mums struggling financially because their partners don’t step up financially!

We worked out how much the short was between wife’s existing salary and a year on mat pay

we saved that between us and then wife had it when she went on Nat Kay did had exactly the same amount of money as before

I think your comment is spot on, however there is not a 50% chance of a marriage not working out, and I felt the need to point that out as the misleading figure is often quoted as a reason why people don't persue marriage. The statistic comes purely from taking the number of marriages contracted in a given year, and, given that it includes a large amount of people making and breaking second, third, fourth, etc, marriages, it is almost meaningless to ant individual couple's risk of divorce, which will be affected by age at marriage, the length of relationship prior to marriage, education level, religiousity, having children or being childless, and myriad other factors.

Before mat leave, my husband and I both paid a set percentage of our wage into our joint account which pays mortgage, bills etc. and then kept the rest for our personal accounts. I would be left with about £300 to myself which I used for personal bills, coffees, clothes etc. When I went on mat leave we changed it so that we both kept back £300 of our monthly wage and the rest went into joint. So yes husband paid in more at this stage but I wasn't any worse off for being on mat leave. When I returned to work we went back to paying in a percentage again. It all felt very fair to us.

We combined money when I fell pregnant. Always the agreement tbh. All money went into the same pot, bills paid and both took an allowance out per month for our spends and rest into savings that we can both access. DH (partner at the time though) has a hobby so he took that separate which is fair enough. It's still like this now and he's on 15k more than me, I ask occasionally if he's still happy with this arrangement and he tells me off as it's family money.

Ideally you get married first and then all the money goes into one pot and everything comes out of one pot, because you're a family
Men who let the mother of their chism struggle financially if they could help don't tend to be in long lived relationships

I paid for my own mat leave.

He sends me the difference between my mat pay and regular wage, and we pay our bills as we did before.

How?

Mileage in this. You've felt the need to ask the question because some part of you is aware that your earning power is about to be affected my maternity and his is not. This will be true for a variable length of time depending on a large number of factors some of which are our of anyone's control

I saved as much as I could whilst pregnant and used that to top my mat pay up each month so i continued to contribute as much as I normally would for as
long as possible then once I was running low we topped up out of our joint savings account to make sure all bills, etc were covered. I am the higher earner, there is no way my husband would be able to cover the bills on his own even if it was temporary so that wasn’t an option, he did pay extra into our joint saving account when he could when I was pregnant and whilst I was still covering my share of the bills so he did contribute as much as he could.

Work mat pay and savings.

I paid for my own mat leave too.

I earn enough that my occupational maternity pay (full pay 6m plus smp for additional period) was enough to cover my half of the bills & my expenses including "fun money".

DH had more money left over than me but split it evenly between 2 savings accounts, one in my name one in his.

Why would you not have joint finances? As far as I'm concerned there's no concept of 'my money, your money' when it comes to your partner

And more importantly, why? Unless you're single, it's completely unfair that the parent who has to be pregnant, give birth, and breastfeed, also has to essentially pay her baby's father for the privilege of getting to do 90% of the hard work in the early months.

I’m not judging you? I didn’t say YOU were being financially abused, but there are many threads where women are during mat leave.
And I DID include advice which is quite similar to other posters.

A little old fashioned to have to get married in this day and age.

It’s nothing to do with being old fashioned, its about not making yourself totally financially vulnerable.

There have been so many posts on here over the years from women who have had babies with their partners, but the partner has later died/gone off with another woman and they have been left with nothing.

Of course they didn’t imagine this would happen, but they have given up work/gone part time/not got a pension etc and because they aren’t married, have no claim to their husband’s money or his nice pension that hasn’t had big child-rearing sized gaps!

I would advise any woman to get married before having children unless you are independently already wealthy. If you own the house you both live in, have a large inheritance and a massive pension pot-it doesn’t matter so much!