[quote]she’s the only person round here who has seen me in the buff. So I think that qualifies as being trustworthy.
[/quote]
Dunno about that – she obviously hasn’t given you her flickr account information. And you should get that mole seen to before it covers your entire scrotum.
Other. I run the finances (and will continue to do so once we get married later this year). I would never be in a relationship where it wasn’t at least 50-50 or leaning my way.
[quote=“Elegua”]I got married before I got my first job, thus I’ve never seen a paycheck in my adult life.
Well, I did see one during my summer internship during grad school.
I get an allowance. [/quote]
I have a good job and I just got a raise from the wife. 100 dollars US a month. Before that it was 10 US a week…I had a bigger allowance when I was 10.
My wife has her money. I have my money. She has a significant proportion of my money.
I do the financial stuff using “our” money. But I also have bank accounts separate from hers. She is terrible at managing “her” money so I help her with that. She now actually has a savings account, and another account she does not know she has, that she never quite was able to have before our marriage.
Still…somehow someway…almost every month I still have her handing me unpaid stuff and asking me…“Honey…what do you think you should do about this?”
Thankfully…the wife is not a big spender on “big” stuff…but she will impulse buy her way all through a trad market or grocery store…“Tai-tai…don’t look 'em in the eye!”
And I’m the one carrying the bags as we leave.
Every month, I take the monthly budget allowance out of the bank (the rest gets saved and invested) and allocate it to envelopes based upon numbers I calculated by averaging our consumption rates over a number of months. Then, I let my fiancee spend it how she likes. She knows no more money will be withdrawn from the bank, so she knows she has to work with what’s there – if she takes more from one area, it’s less from another, even if that literally means not eating for a week.
It’s the same with the wedding plans. Back in the day, she said she didn’t want a diamond ring because it’s wasteful and she’d be worried about something happening to it. She asked if that were okay, and I said that would be fine – I’d give her the equivalent amount of money to spend on whatever she wanted. She’s decided she wants another holiday (in addition to the honeymoon) early next year. Since I, and she (to a lesser extent), consider weddings to be incredibly wasteful (a whole bunch of strangers eating their way through hundreds of thousands of NT in a matter of hours and still finding shit to complain about), the kicker is that I added that amount onto the total budget for the wedding itself and put it to her like this: anything that’s left over from the budget you can add to the holiday fund. If you go over the budget, you have less for the holiday fund. So, the choices are all hers. In matter of fact, if she does a good job at saving for this holiday then I’ll probably throw some more money at it as a reward for that.
She’s currently trying very hard to be “economic” in planning this wedding because she wants a better holiday next year. For me, it’s the same amount of money either way, but it gives her the possibility of choice. It’s also an education in delayed gratification and really reflecting on what she wants, not what everyone else/society tell people they should have.
Various relatives of hers complain that I should give her more money for an endless parade of frivolous, consumeristic shit, yet she’s sensible enough (which is one of many reasons I’m going to marry her) to realise that in twenty years, none of them will have two red 1NT coins to run together, whereas we’ll have a small fortune in investments. Of course, the hard part will be when they all come to sponge off us.
[quote=“TainanCowboy”]
My wife has her money. I have my money. She has a significant proportion of my money.[/quote]
There It Is!
My wife is far better with money that I am. I wish I had more to give her, if that would make her happy. Yet the fact of the matter is that it would take any awful lot of cash for me to feel comfortable enough with letting her “control” money for which I’ve toiled hard. That’s got nothing really to do with her as a person, I’m just an Auld Weegie Bampot when it comes to colored paper for which I have traded precious time and effort.
My wife has access to my main bank account. Its our joint account but she doesn’t work - call it what you will. I think she calls it her money.
I have an account in the UK which until recently was overdrawn but realised that was silly and now has a small balance
We both have investments and regular savings. We discuss additional investments before making them but they go in individual names because they are easier to manage that way
My regular savings come out of our (her account ) joint account
Mortgage is in joint names (her house )
There is a lot of trust because otherwise how do you live as a single unit? If we ever divorced I’d be screwed and so would she and then there’s the boy.
Its never easy because money is always emotive. We don’t generally fight about it - which is a blessing.
) joint account