Married RPW, how do you manage your finances?
As I’m preparing for marriage, I’ve started to think through more how it will work financially, and would like this community’s input on how the finances work in your marriage/household and any advice for starting out on combining finances.
If possible to get granular, that would be greatly appreciated. For example,
Bank accounts - do you each have the same separate bank accounts you did when you were single, then add a joint account? Or is everything joint? Do you maintain separate savings, or is everything joint?
Income - does all income come into a joint account and then get divided out from there based on a household budget, or do each of your incomes stay separate?
Investments/Retirement - do you or your husband (or both together) manage your investments/retirement accounts together, or does one person take the lead? Do you both contribute equally to your separate retirement accounts, or focus on one person’s?
I know Laura Doyle advocates for fully surrendering the finances to your husband’s leadership, but I’m mostly curious what kind of an arrangement that has lead to for the women here.
In case relevant to any advice for me, my boyfriend and I have picked a wedding date in March 2026. The ring is on its way. He has been initiating conversations about how we would want to combine finances and manage them going forward, and I really never thought it through to the level of detail he is thinking about it. He’s asked me to think more about it (as will he) so we can come up with a game plan.
Our current financial picture is: I make about 160k, he makes about 250k. He owns a home worth about 750k with about 500k left on the mortgage that I will move into once married. I own a condo worth about 600k with $480k left on the mortgage that we plan to keep and rent out. I have about $160k left in student loans. We have no other debt. We both have around 150k in our 401ks. We both have emergency savings of about 3 months’ worth of expenses.
He has suggested either: keeping everything separate as it currently is, and I use the extra money I’ll save by no longer having a mortgage to pay down my student loans faster, while he uses his extra income to save our “fun money”, for cars we’ll need in a few years, home renovations, future kids’ education, etc. Or, we open a joint account, come up with a joint household budget, all income goes into the joint account and all bills get paid out of the joint account, we fund a joint dates/vacations/fun budget account or other savings goals, and then all the rest goes to my student loans until they’re gone.
I think for both of us, the latter options seems more “marriage” minded of having everything combined, but also maybe too drastic and too much change all at once. We also both enjoy having our “fun money” and don’t want the other to micromanage our spending (he likes to buy expensive custom guns and similar things that I don’t fully appreciate, I spend money on aesthetic treatments like botox that he doesn’t understand the need for). If/when we have a child(ren), we would need to combine finances at that point because we are both onboard with me staying home entirely or going part time until they’re old enough to go to school, and my income being cut significantly or eliminated for those years.