Don't understand 100% joint finances

[Lorendo]

I know I'll get flamed for this but I don't get it when couples only have joint finances and nothing separate.

Me and DH have a joint account to cover joint expenses (house, cars childcare) etc. We each put same in each month as earn similar.

We also have joint saving pots for certain things where we put certain amount into eg holiday, emergency fund, kids stuff.

That's it. Anything left stays in our separate personal accounts for whatever we please.

This seems like a logical way to do it. All joint obligations are sorted together but we still retain independence with what's left.

A friend of mine only does joint. She only works part time so a different situation to us but husband monitors every penny in and out. If she buys something he doesn't agree with or that she didn't clear with him first, he brings it up.

I told her my arrangement and she just said 'yes well we like to manage all the money together, as a team'. Right ok, sounds more like financial abuse than team work but hey ho

Joint finances too. At times in my marriage I have earned much more than my husband and at other times he has earned much more than me, but we have never had more or less money than the other because we share everything equally

My DH and I had a joint account only and didn't police what each other was spending money on. It worked perfectly well.

We’ve never quite managed to get it right. I’d be happy to have entirely joint finances but I would say that as I earn probably about a quarter of what DH does. We used to - actually still do - put relative amounts into a joint account each month to pay for bills etc but tbh the amounts are out of date now and most of the big bills now come from DH’s account (which I have access to). He periodically moans that he is paying all the mortgage etc but we never quite get round to sorting it. I did do the sums and worked out total joint monthly expenses and what we should each pay based on our income. But it still seems a bit unfair to me that he would have so much extra spare money than me after it’s all paid. Joint everything would be simpler!

Yeah I agree.. never argued about money with my ex or current partner. All bills are paid and then we are free to spend as we wish without judgement/permission/explanation. It helps that I’ve always earned around the same amount as the people I’ve lived with. Obviously we help each other out too - it’s like one big pot but after essentials, the other parts of it are managed separately.
Also the number of threads on here where people are told to LTB.. how do you do that when money is one pot.

Your example is nothing to do with joint accounts and everything to do with financial abuse.

The point I'm making is that with 100% joint finances there's always going to be an element of surveillance on what you spend (whether what you consider a "high" is £100, £1000 or £20,000 is probably due to your income - but there will be an amount spent your partner WILL question you on)

Nope, not necessarily. We have been married several decades and I don’t recall anyone questioning the other, ever. No ‘surveillance’ either. The only time we have ever asked each other anything has been if we notice money out that doesn’t seem to ‘match’ anything so that we know there are no fraudulent charges, and that can be big or small. For example, I noticed a lot of tiny amounts out to somewhere consistently with an odd name so asked DH if he knew what that was. He scratched his head when I told him the name but when we looked at amounts he realised it must be coffee shop near his work (he changed work locations). This was not ‘surveillance’ about his spending, but just being sensible to check that someone was not fraudulently drip feeding money out of our account. Similarly, at times DH may ask if I know what x amount to whatever is, and I respond ‘yes’ as the sole reason he is asking is re fraud if something looks odd, there is no comment, justification or discussion about the actual amount/spending.

DH and I are not outliers, most people we know work their finances the same way.

When I got married I actually said the words "all that I am I give to you and all that I have I share with you". We have done that very happily for 24 years with no arguments or issues. But we're do have a very similar attitude to money fortunately.

“All bills, food and the mortgage get paid out of an account in my name, DH puts 50% of the value in there every month”

That’s not really practical though is it as there’s no way of knowing every joint expense without the bother of going through and adding up every single thing every single month. Yes some bills like mortgage and council tax are fixed but food, kids shoes or school trips etc will vary. What a hassle.

Also wholeheartedly agree. We do have a joint account that mortgage, bills and food comes out of, and we each pay in 50% of outgoings. Our earnings go into personal accounts then we transfer our share into the joint. We earn differently but split 50/50, I don’t subscribe to us having to have the same disposable income. Whoever has more money at any one point might pay more towards a holiday or something but then the other pays them back. When either of us has had a quiet time work-wise (both self employed) we’ve still contributed our share from savings, but if one of us was going to be out of work long-term through illness then yes, the other would have to take over the outgoings once savings ran out.

I would absolutely hate having everything joint and feeling like my partner was spending my money, and it would feel wrong to me to access his money. I actively don’t want to get married and wanting to keep finances separate is a big reason for this.

Why is it unfair though? If you want more spare money I presume he isn’t stopping you looking for a job that pays more.

I don't understand why you feel you need separate finances to have financial independence. We have everything 100% joint. I am still financially independent - all I would need to do is take my ID, open an account, and change the account my employer pays my wage into.

I couldn't imagine having separate pots of money that we're entitled to. To each their own, I guess.

You could say the same about living together though - someone will always see your comings and goings and you’re not truly free, you don’t even get a bedroom to yourself in most cases. I don’t see many people fundamentally objecting to the concept. Because well yes, we agreed to share our lives. We have joint finances here, we have a joint financial life and future. We don’t police each other.

Same here. For richer, for poorer and all that. We both have shared financial goals and discuss big purchases. We tend to push discretionary larger spending towards pay day when we know if it's going to leave us overdrawn and if so we put it off. It's worked fine for decades. I like that everything is even and it's never just one of us struggling when things are tight.

I don't think there is. My husband has never commented on whatever I spend, and that includes 30+k on a renovation project (that I also hadn't discussed with him beyond the fact that I wanted to do something) that was half our entire savings. At some point I mentioned to him all our savings were almost gone (down from 70k) and he just says oh ok. Then we started savings again. He couldn't tell you what it went on.

Though we do discuss whether we have enough money to cover the end of the month and sometimes we check if we have big expenses coming up. But we never talk about what the expenses would be. It's just "hey will we still have 300 left this month?" And the other one says I think so (or no and we wait until the next month) and then one of us buys kids clothes/stag weekend tickets/summer camps/a gift. It's always just a liquidity check though, never about what it's about.

Wouldn't occur to me to check his money instincts and wouldn't occur to me to tell him why I spend so much more money than him (I do more organizing for the kids and house projects).

When one of you dies, joint finances suddenly make a lot of sense. Your shared account/s continue as sole accounts without any complicated admin or inheritance issues.

DH and I both came from very different family backgrounds on this.

My parents had totally joint finances. Both worked, earning similar. Everything went into one joint account which my mother managed more or less single handedly because my Dad really hated doing it. He was nervous of the figures managing the household finances including the mortgage so happily left it to my mother. It worked for them.

DH's parents never shared any finances. No joint accounts at all. Salaries just paid into their individual accounts and they just got on with it. It seemed to work.

We did have one joint account but barely used much. We maintained largely separate finances and I think we both preferred it that way. We didn't keep tabs on each other. It worked for us for 33 years until DH died recently. Only now that I have to take on everything is it causing the odd minor issue as I take everything on myself. Nothing major at all, but as DH's accounts have had to close and transfer everything to me there has been the odd little surprise as I (despite being his executor) was not allowed to see and comb through any of his bank statements. Nothing really problematic or unmanageable, just the occasional little arrangement I hadn't known about.

Apologies in advance, as I know this sounds goady, but to all the "fully joint finances works for us because we're a partnership!" PPs, how would you navigate him deciding to leave you and clearing your joint account one day? How would you buy food or pay for petrol to get your kids to school?

I know if divorce comes, ultimately the marital assets will be divided between you, but how would you function in the intervening period if he took all the "family money"?

This happened to a neighbour of mine and it just made a terrible situation worse.

I think there are a lot of ways to be financially abusive. Withholding, if done in an abusive manner without consent, is just one. If your ex consented to you managing all the money, I only see one abusive person in that transaction, and it’s not you. I think it’s deeply misogynistic for feckless men to outsource managing their fecklessness to their wives. It’s forcing you to use your brain power and your free time to make his life easier, and you can’t choose whether to consent or not, because what’s the alternative - he spends all the money? You have nothing for you and the kids? So yeah. I think your ex was a financially abusive dick and so was mine, but in different ways.

DH and I probably started pooling finances a couple of months after we met. 37 years later it still works for us. If you are married/have a relationship with a coercive controlling asshole then no, not a great idea.

Where 100% joint finances tends to struggle is when in reality money is a bit tight and one or both sides doesn't really recognise that and is spending more than "their share"

But the same thing would happen with separate accounts. Even if you weren’t hiding stuff, if new shoes and clothes are piling up then they’re going to know and maybe think blimey that’s a lot of shopping this month.
Even if they didn’t care and were totally oblivious, that would still impact on whether someone could pay their half of the bills that month!

And even worse if they were some kind of compulsive shopper, they could be racking up debt with the spouse not even realising.

Also - of course what you spend is important unless you have huge amounts of spare cash. I mean if someone has zero idea of what the other one is doing with their spending, then yes it’s going to be pretty odd if one of them says let’s have a luxury holiday for the family to xyz place but the other one can only afford half of a butlins weekend. As they’ve been spending a grand on clothes every month.

We’ve had separate finances since we started living together 27 years ago. I think this is much more common in second marriages. I was single and in complete control of my own money for over a decade before we met, there was no way I was going to relinquish that.

Ditto. This.

100% joint worked when we both worked full time and we didn't have time to faff around putting things in different places and we had a few problems in the past with separate accounts while i was unemployed; once we were at the good food show with no money to spend cos there was a glitch and his pay hadn't moved into the joint account on standing order when it should have. My husband is a spreadsheet geek and his pay changed all the time due to overtime and overnights 'on call' so he likes to know exactly how much money we have to the penny and where/when it is going, I can't budget due to dyscalculia so he would tell me how much there was for me to spend or we once trialled taking it out in cash. Now we do have our own accounts, my benefits go into my account and i put all bar £40 for me in the joint account, his pay and benefits go into his account and he does the same anything left over after bills goes to savings for holiday/shopping/social fund.

No, quite the opposite. What I meant was that I don’t hide my spend at all, and therefore it wouldn’t matter if he ‘noticed’ it on the joint account. He wouldn’t care and wouldn’t comment.
We both only spend what we can afford, so there is no element of ‘why have you spent £££ on x?’. If we couldn’t afford it, we wouldn’t spend it, and if we can afford it, why would the other care? I can genuinely say he has never once commented negatively on something I have purchased.
Having an individual account wouldn’t mean I suddenly had loads more money available to me to spend on whatever I wanted. I’d still have to budget and live within my means, like we both do with a joint account.