SUCCESSFUL RELATIONSHIPS
going to pay for what, whether certain ex-
penditures were prudent or necessary, and
the annoying gap between cash going out
and cash coming in.
The good news: this means lots of
chances to practice these conversations
in a coolheaded manner. The bad news:
it also means lots of opportunities for
sphincter-tightening conversations full
of accusations and finger-pointing.
Money crises can also hit unexpect-
edly, which ramp up everyone’s stress lev-
els. The broken-down car, the job loss, the
child who suddenly needs medical help,
the dead refrigerator with its warm beer.
Financial setbacks also have a vicious way
of cascading—e.g., you can’t make your full
credit card payments for a few months, so
the interest starts to compound.
Spending fights are also the ones cou-
ples tend to put off. They then have to have
that same quarrel about budgeting or that
unpaid bill or why we can’t go away over
spring break—again and again and again.
There’s nothing like a fight you’ve already
had six times in a year to really get that
blood boiling.
Financial battles are also different from
any other kind of feud because the loss of
money provokes our strongest emotion:
fear. People get depressed if they think
their sex lives are going down the drain;
they get frustrated when they can’t agree
on how to discipline the kids. But they
don’t start imagining they’re going to lose
everything. That tight little ball of dread
often tips us over into the irrational—
imagine we could be left walking the
streets in ill-fitting shoes, dragging our be-
longs in a rolling suitcase with one work-
ing wheel.So, iS there a particular way to handle
your finances that works best? I asked
more than 150 couples from around the
English-speaking world to let me know
how they divided up their income and ex-
penses, and I got dozens of permutations
of three answers. Some people liked joint
accounts. They pool all their income and
pay for everything together. For many thiswas about simplifying the bookkeeping as
much as anything. The difficulties with the
one big pot of income are obvious: how to
determine who gets to take a taste every
now and then and how much is appropri-
ate to ladle out for personal consumption.
A New Jersey couple handle this by having
separate amounts each partner can spend
built into the budget “so we don’t have to
be concerned about it.”
There were other couples who pre-
ferred to keep all accounts separate and
to divide up the expenses. This appeared
to be a more popular choice among those
without kids, probably because the mas-
sive income suck that kids represent
makes it too unwieldy to have separate ac-
counts. Some people suggest that keeping
individual accounts means the couple are
less committed and don’t really trust each
other, but that’s not necessarily true; they
have to be very committed and trusting to
believe that each other is paying his or her
share of the bills.
A third option, recommended by many
financial managers, is a kind of yours-
mine-and-ours approach. A large per-
centage of each paycheck is deposited
into a joint account to pay for household
expenses, and a smaller percentage goes
to each partner’s separate accounts, to
do with as they please. As long as those
percentages are agreed upon and ob-
served, nobody gets to criticize the other’s
choices. I buy my clothes at the second-
hand store, but I like to go monthly and
donate a lot of stuff back again. My hus-
band will buy a crazy expensive Helmut
Lang overcoat and wear it every cold day
for 10 years and look sharp as a No. 2 pen-
cil, until I accidentally give it to the Sal-
vation Army. (Wrong bag, was supposed
to go to the dry cleaner.) But if he wanted
to spend his portion of our liquid assets
on rainbow stickers, I wouldn’t have the
right to criticize, as long as all family
needs were met.
Most people think the third option is
the fairest, according to a 2017 study out of
the University of Maryland, which polled a
nationally representative sample of Amer-Unexpected
money
crises ramp
up stress
levels: the
broken-
down car,
the job
loss, the
child who
suddenly
needs
medical
help.