Finances in a relationship are a very challenging topic. My wife and I spent hours coming up with systems that worked well for us. When we first started living together my wife gave me a few hundred dollars every month to help cover the mortgage and utilities. This worked well but we were still broke most of the time.
After we got married we sat down and took a hard look at all of our finances together. We utilized the budget spreadsheet to lay out all of our expenses. We quickly realized that we both had credit card debt that was weighing us down significantly and we needed to tackle it quickly.
After we had all of our expenses laid out we quickly came up with a new plan for handling all of our finances.
- All of our paychecks would be deposited into one central account
- We would each have a separate checking account where some discretionary amount would be put each pay period
- All extra money would go to paying off our large debts
This is the system that we have been using for 6 years now and it is working very well. Now that we are both making more money in our careers we have been able to add additional direct deposit accounts to automate our savings.
While finances are a very stressful topic in a relationship, I feel that being very transparent about your finances going into marriage is a critical component to having successful financial health!
