To ask how you split your household finances?

[FlipFlopFairy]

My husband and I have separate bank accounts but split the outgoings to allow us to have the same ‘spends’ each month. I know that sounds fair, but what I challenge is what is classed as household outgoings.

For transparency, he earns about 2.5 times my salary, and his bonuses pay for holidays.

I suppose fixed outgoings would be a better phrase than household outgoings. Included in his fixed outgoings is payments for his 2 cars. I have a company car, so my car payments are taken from my gross salary.

Because he has included both cars in his outgoings, it means less ‘spends’ for me, and it feels like I’m helping to fund his cars, when I’m funding my own already.

On top of this, my outgoings include responsibility for variables, such as food and shoes and clothes for the children, so some months I have less ‘spends’ than others. It just feels quite imbalanced.

When I’ve raised this, he just cannot seem to see my point of view. He only sees that his total outgoings from his bank account far exceed mine, and not that his cars (at the very least, the second car) are more of a personal expense, in the same way mine is.

AIBU to think that our expenses need to be reworked to be more fair?

Only a £100. Very surprised DH recently. Looked into one and was going to reduce his net pay by a lot more than a £100. A month. Sounds like you are only down £35 a month by contributing to 2nd car. Would you be better or worse of using the ratio method which seems very common on here. I used to take a monthly amount out for kids stuff as soon as I stopped and just took directly from house account. I had a lot more money as was always over spending different made up from my personal money.

If he earns 2.5 times more than you isn't your free spend already more than you would have if you were to pay proportionally even with the 2nd car included? I agree the 2nd car is a personal spend - can he just reduce to 1 car?

Oh come on. We have a joint account but it's not hard to imagine reasons why. One person having debt, or children outside the relationship or an expensive hobby. Some people get married later in life and keep their assets. Not everyone is responsible with money also. Yea relationships between two responsible adults where there is trust a joint account is fine, but a simple read of MN tells you this is not the case for many people

I think this could open a can of worms. He could go down the dirty road of taking holidays out of the joint pot, seeing as he currently pays for them. We have a joint account, all our money gets put into it. We transfer money to our individual revolut for personal spending as we need it but we never keep tabs on who is spending what.

As an aside, are you covered my insurance to drive your company car for non-work related journeys?

I’m not sure on the calculations there. If we pretend my £100 BIK didn’t come out of my salary and was a family expense, that’s still £750 a month less than the second car costs. And don’t forget this is the second car. I’m not even arguing about the first car, which also incidentally costs more than £100 a month.
If my car is in consideration, so should the first car be

No, I don't get why anyone marries if they don't want to let go of the whole idea of spending or saving being "their own". That's what marriage means; you join forces; you're a team. Your home and your dc and your money and everything else. If you're not confident that the other person's approach to financial management (and everything else that matters) is in sync with yours, why get married? We're talking about marriage here, not unmarried partners. (Nowadays, if you don't really trust the other person, there's nothing to stop you staying as partners).

We have a joint account. All earnings go in. All expenses out. We spend as we please.

This was also the same when I was a sahm. Dh wage went into joint account to cover everything. We then both used the account as we please.

My parents and his parents are the same too

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I would hope we can be adult about it. Ultimately, if he doesn’t pay for holidays, he doesn’t go either.
Yes, my car is free for personal use, with spouse included on insurance

That's not how I view marriage. Personally, I see it as a social contract between two people who have mutual respect and love for one another. With that comes obligations and duties towards one another, some of which are financial
But, for example, if I inherit money - even after being married for 20 years - it's my money only. It only become a joint asset if I use it for a joint purpose (commingling). The law protects me against the idea that a marriage is the merging of assets - this isn't the 19th century.

Everything has always been joint/shared, there is no separate money. Can't imagine anything different.

£850 per month for a second car?! That's crazy. I agree that shouldn't be a joint cost.

For those who only have 1 joint account and no personal accounts, how do you buy each other presents without the other seeing the transaction?

No, I don't get why anyone marries if they don't want to let go of the whole idea of spending or saving being "their own". That's what marriage means; you join forces; you're a team. Your home and your dc and your money and everything else.

But again that's fine (and probably sensible) in the "vanilla" scenario with a working husband, non working or PT working wife and children from the same parents. But not all marriages are like this. If you throw any bit of complexity into the mix its very easy to see why that's less workable.

For example;

• A woman who significantly out-earns her husband (the financial guarantees of marriage are designed to protect the weaker partner, not to shore up the stronger one)
• Children from outside the marriage, whose inheritance would be impacted
• An inheritance to one partner from a parent

It's very easy to say if you trust someone there shouldn't be a problem but this is much broader than just being about trust. There are so many potential parameters here.

Why should a child be effectively disinherited because one of their parents has remarried?

Why should a very high-earning woman support a coasting man who can't be arsed to work as hard?

Why should both spouses be on the hook for child maintenance from a child who predates the marriage?

I have a child from a previous marriage and I earn more than my partner so I would never get married. But I can absolutely understand that people might want to combine some of their assets but ring-fence others. Marriage can be a very blunt instrument for these sorts of subtelties.

Separate accounts work for us. We pay for different things but with the implicit understanding it's joint assets. Sometimes i book and pay for holidays, sometimes he does, sometimes we transfer over funds to each other etc. I like that we have separate accounts and each has full control over personal discretionary spend and savings. We are not spendy people but quite different ideas about savings, so i would find it tricky to pool with him.

DH earns 30% more. But if i had OP's level of earning disparity (2.5x) I'd definitely go for a joint account.

Always had a joint account where both salaries went, however it is slightly different now as DH is self-employed and so we have a business account. DH pays a regular but smaller amount of what he has earned into our joint account - the rest stays in the business account, whilst my full salary goes into the joint account. DH pays for petrol and all vehicular expenses from the business account and I obviously pay mine out of the joint account.

We get the same amount each week to spend however we want, whether that is to save, invest or gamble etc. We generally pay for social activities out of the joint account, and then we save money into a joint savings account.

We don't really buy presents. If we did we could always use a credit card I suppose. Sometimes we do but it's usually from Amazon or somewhere else equally generic so even if the other did spot it they wouldn't know what it was.

Neither of us are interested in going through the bank statements line by line or bothered about the amount either of us has spent on the other being a big secret.

'That's not how I view marriage. Personally, I see it as a social contract between two people who have mutual respect and love for one another.'

@TaupePanda again, that's great, but it does not take away from the fact that marriage has a legal, historic and cultural definition that focuses on the sharing of assets. It can mean whatever you would like it to mean on a personal level, but as I said, there is no need for posters to pretend to be shocked and appalled by the notion of someone wanting to adhere to the literal functions of a marriage.

He’s taking advantage of you. You already know that, and hopefully the replies here will help you to take some action against him x

For those who only have 1 joint account and no personal accounts, how do you buy each other presents without the other seeing the transaction?

DH and I do have additional individual accounts for our own discretionary spending (see above) but gifts are a family expense that come from a joint account. We just…don’t look. We set a larger family gift budget by month that takes into account occasions that month and agree between us on a range for each other’s birthday & Christmas gifts. When I make a gift purchase for DH I code it in our system as a gift just like I do with the gift I bought for DC4’s friend’s bday party and DH isn’t going to go combing through the transactions in that category to try to detective out what I got him before he gets to open it. If he did it would be his own surprise he ruined I guess. We budget in advance so we only have to dig into specific transactions if one of us feels like the gift budget we set isn’t right anymore and we have to talk about whether we need to reign in that spending or pull budget from something else.

ETA: if I really wanted to keep something a surprise I could just buy from an individual account and reimburse myself, but I know people who just put the money for gifts on a prepaid card then make the actual purchases using that. In both cases the joint account just shows a total amount with no hints about what was purchased where.

I wouldn’t say he’s taking advantage of me. That sounds a bit harsh. We just need to rework the money coming out and going out, and for him to acknowledge that his second car is a luxury rather than a necessity, despite it being a fixed cost

Joint account. Both our salaries go in and we share what's in there.

We don't regularly go through transactions and analyse really unless we get low at the end of the month and we're not sure how we've spent much. Surely any gift purchases just say cost and name of shop anyway, not the item.

We don't buy presents for each other at all. Not for birthdays or Christmas. If we want anything at all we just buy it and that comes out of the joint or savings account.

if I decide I want to move my money around immediately I can, I do not have time to consult DH on decisions always and neither does he. I invest as does DH. We discuss finances often, I’m currently making more money than him on a smaller portfolio much to his irritation and admiration.

But when married legally your inheritance is joint whether you see it as only yours or not.

when I inherited a relatively small amount from my grandparent, it just went into our joint assets and we discussed together how to invest it. It did not occur to me that it was just my own money- we’re a team.