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For the latter group, an alternative she likes is to keep accounts separate but establish clear rules for who pays which expenses.

This is the approach that Farnoosh Torabi, a financial editor at large at the consumer-technology site CNET, told me that she recommends for married couples as well as non-married committed ones. “Partners shouldn’t have to have a conversation about every single purchase.” The basic idea is that a couple has a shared account to pay shared expenses, and then individual accounts for discretionary spending they may have joint and individual savings accounts as well.This setup lets couples “feel like they are both working together to support each other and their partnership, while also giving each other some autonomy,” Paco de Leon, the author of Finance for the People: Getting a Grip on Your Finances, told me.

Which is why the hybrid approach seems like a wise one. But it would also do away with that appealing “shared-ness” Holmes was talking about. One commonly reported downside, though, of putting everything in shared accounts is that couples sometimes question each other’s spending decisions-did “we” really need to spend our money on that? Keeping funds entirely separate would preserve the financial autonomy that many people want and are used to from their single lives. “It was a onetime decision that … plays out in a general sense of ‘we.’” “It creates a shared-ness,” Holmes told me of her experience. But that isn’t necessarily an argument for following their example, because this finding could mean that sharing money makes couples happier or just that couples who are happier to begin with are more likely to share their money.Ĭassie Mogilner Holmes, a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and a co-author of a recent study on this subject, told me that despite the lack of strong causal evidence, she personally decided to merge most of her money with her husband’s after doing this research. In fact, research indicates that couples who put all their money together are, on average, more satisfied with their relationship, and this pattern is especially pronounced for low-income couples. “As women are coming into relationships having their own income, that can facilitate the need for a conversation in the first place,” Joanna Pepin, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo, told me. Of course, that precedent comes from a time when women were much less likely to do paid work than they are now. The upside of couples combining all of their money is that it can promote a sense of unity, as “mine” becomes “ours.” More practically, pooling resources can buffer both partners from ups and downs that they may experience with their respective finances.Īnd surely, many couples switch to fully shared accounts simply because that’s how marriage has typically worked in previous generations. And although no single system is going to be best for everyone, I tend to agree. The personal-finance experts I spoke with recently tended to side more with Orman, advocating for a “hybrid” approach-sharing some money and keeping some money separate. Suze Orman has said she would “never, ever have just one joint account.” Dave Ramsey has dismissed arguments for keeping separate accounts as “a bunch of crap.” Respondents in a 2016 survey were split almost exactly 50–50 on the question of whether a married couple should merge all their money, and two titans of American personal finance give conflicting advice on the matter. The share of committed couples, married or not, who keep at least some of their finances separate has risen in recent decades, in part because Americans tend to marry later, after they’ve already developed their own financial habits.Īs norms have shifted, though, Americans haven’t reached a consensus on which financial arrangement is best for relationships. In the 1970s and ’80s, not doing that was sometimes considered a bad omen for a relationship. When Americans marry, their finances usually do too: The majority of married couples put all their income into shared accounts.