Merging finances

[Rupiduti]

Hello all,

For those of you who put all money in to joint accounts and then each take a certain amount out for personal spends, how much per month do you have for personal spends?
And what counts as personal spends?
Say for example it's partner 1's mum's birthday. Does the birthday present come out of personal spend or joint account?

Another scenario example, partner 2 works part time as there is a child. Each week partner 2 meets up with a friend for lunch (with the children) does that meal come out of personal spends or joint.

I realise there's going to be different things that work for different people but just trying to figure out some typical rules people follow.

We are actually really open about money and finances but being a woman I want to protect myself in case anything happens in the long run.

We don't have children yet.

We are both on board with merging finances either by percentage of earnings or altogether and then take out 'spends'

I don't like the idea of nothing being private. Like if I want to buy my partner a present its nice that it's separate from joint!

We have completely joint finances-it saves any issues or resentment about paying for things; there's no whose turn is it to pay or which pot does it come from etc... We only seek each other's agreement if it's a big spend other than that, we both just buy what we want to. The only issue comes with buying each other gifts but we just tend to put it on our individual credit cards and then pay the amount off after the event.

We did the individual spends and based it on roughly what we knew we spent on ourselves. The joint pot covered holiday savings and yearly stuff like tv licence etc. Later we did one pot because I became a sahm but we have always had excess, we have never spent down to the last penny. We have a joint points credit card so everything is listed on there meaning we could look at that and review every few months to see where our money was going.

This is all about expectations and being able to openly talk about money without finger pointing.

Thanks all!

We have a joint account and both transfer the same amount each month to cover food and bills. The rest of our wages is our wage and use it as we wish.

We have 2 joint accounts.
Both work full time and he earns more than me (just around 20% more) so every month he transfers that 20% into our joint savings account. That makes our earnings fairly equal.

The other joint account is for bills, food, family outings, children’s stuffs , childcare and we transfer the same percentage of our earnings to it. There’s always something left there at the end of the month and this goes to the joint savings account as well.

The rest, we spend as we want and save into our individual savings accounts. None of us are big spenders and we treat each other on birthdays etc from our individual savings.