Each To His Own Money In The Family?
When everyone’s pulling for themselves, it’s hard to see what the future will look like together, including financially.
I was reading an article about the family budget and this sentence caught my attention: As a couple we have always managed our income separately. We only manage joint expenses together.
I understand that the chick is engaged, so they still have time to decide if they will manage the money jointly in the future, especially after the kids come along, but I don’t really see how this phase works, we are a couple, we live together, but we have separate money.
Do you?
I know it’s practiced out there a lot, I’ve read articles about couples with kids still keeping their money separate, but it seems very complicated and silly to do that.
Ok, you split the instalments and bills between 2, when you go out you pay German, you have separate savings accounts, but when the kids show up what do you do?
Mom pays for the pampers, Dad pays for the formula?
Mom pays for private daycare, Dad pays for singing lessons?
It also seems crazy to me in terms of motivation, in the sense that I say that in a family you have to have common goals, including financial goals.
We pull harder to save money, to pay our instalments faster, to invest in something, to open a fund for the children’s education and so on.
Maybe I’m not seeing things correctly, but since we’ve been living together we’ve always pooled our money, and from there we’ve divided the budget according to what each of us needs.
There have been times when I’ve earned more because I’ve had better paying jobs, there have been times when he’s earned more because he’s had more ok jobs, there have been times when he or I haven’t worked or we’ve been paid poorly, but we’ve never put it that way, let’s split the expenses between the two of us and the rest of the time it’s every man for himself, we visit each other in the evenings from time to time.
How do you do things in your family, do you budget together or separately?
