re: Getting Married and Managing Money

quote:

---

I THINK majority of us ‘separate accounters’ do it because it creates less tension if there’s two opposite money minded people in the marriage. I want to eat cheap lunches and splurge on duck hunting. My wife wants her Starbucks coffee every morning and to get loads of packages mailed to the house. She doesn’t have to call me every time she buys something from amazon. She can buy what she wants without feeling like she’s 12 and asking me for ‘permission’. Likewise I don’t want her calling me asking why I spent $300 at Mack’s Prairie Wings either. All you “a marriage makes you one” folks need to loosen up and realize there’s more than one way to manage money and still be married.

---

Hear, hear. Money is power, and sharing power gracefully is good for all involved.

quote:

---

wg dawg

---

Ditto..

We are likely different genders, so the perception of power sharing via separate accounts resonates very differently for us. If I had a dollar for every female I knew who found herself in mid-life (or nearing retirement) with no money, children to feed, and a spouse who decided he needed a younger model, I could pay my mortgage. I know highly educated women who made a joint decision to stay home with children--fast forward 10 years, and Mr. Midlife Crisis moves out, doesn't pay child support until the divorce settlement is final, and Mrs. has to re-enter the workforce behind the curve for her age....not a fun place to be, yet countless women across America are in exactly that place every day.

I absolutely support separate funds as a gender equity issue. Without a separate financial identity, a newly widowed or newly separated/divorced woman often has difficulty getting credit. If she had assets in her own name, had borrowed funds and repaid them in her own name, she would not be reduced to financial second class citizenship.

It is no threat to anyone if all of the accounts are discussed and everyone's finances are transparent.

Just read up this thread and see the references to joint accountholders who nevertheless feel they need to hide money from their spouses. That's the unhealthy, relationship-undermining behavior, to me.

I grew up in the generation defined by divorce: fully 50% of my peers from earliest childhood were growing up in divorced families...and I’m old enough so that most of those families were single main income (dad) and either part time work or no second income (mom). All those folks most likely had single joint accounts, and it made absolutely no difference. They got divorced regardless of their co-mingled funds.

Staying married is hard work....whether you have one bank account or six. In the examples I cited for you above, the women I know certainly weren’t entering the marriage, voluntarily leaving the workforce to raise children & thus forfeiting career advancement and income, with any intention of ever leaving it. They were hit with situations they certainly didn’t expect. Heck, I can introduce you to a lovely young retiree whose husband literally called her from a routine business trip to Singapore and said “sorry, honey, it’s been a good 35 years, but I’m staying here with Cynthia. Here’s my new address...”. No warning, nothing. Dude had been living an entirely parallel life while conducting frequent business abroad. Ask ANY woman you know, she’ll have plenty of similar midlife/late life dump stories.

Planning for failure is not equivalent to maintaining a sense of separate personhood. No one, male or female, should be reduced to a legal non-entity by marriage. Read up on abusive spouses (physical, mental, emotional): a principle reason cited by women who stay with HORRIBLE men is a lack of funds to re-establish their (and their children’s) lives.