The way I’m thinking about doing this if I get married is to categorize things like this:
All money goes into a shared account
The shared account pays shared expenses like the mortgage, vacations, dates, house things and groceries
We each get some amount deposited in a personal account (in my case, the same amount for each of us) which we can spend on whatever we want (personal meals, clothes, alcohol, etc.)
Everything else goes into long-term savings
A simpler version would be to drop the shared account, put more money in the personal accounts, and each pay half for shared things. I would expect it to be more problematic though, since then you run into problems like “what if my partner blows all of their money on alcohol and doesn’t pay rent”. The intent of this setup with shared expenses first and then personal accounts is to make it so neither of us has any reason to care what the other does with their personal account. It would also just be more annoying having to constantly split things.
I imagine that shared vacation and dates may sometimes cause problems if one person wants to go on more vacations or dates than the other. I think the best way to handle this is to just discuss expectations rather than changing the financial setup though, since solutions like “the partner who likes vacations spends their personal fund on vacations for both partners” are probably not going to make them happy.
Groceries are another one where there could be complexity based on how similar your grocery needs are, but I think there’s generally a lot of overlap and I don’t expect the differences to be large enough to be worth paying attention to. Your situation may be different if you don’t agree on food at all, especially if the prices of what you want are wildly different.
The “everything else goes into long-term savings” part is potentially specific to me, but this is what I want to do with my spare money anyway, so I don’t mind if I’m disproportionately paying for this.
A previous setup I did was:
I paid for rent, most groceries, and vacations
For everything else, we kept our own income in personal accounts
This went badly because my partner had no incentive to keep any of the costs I paid down (unsurprisingly, they wanted to go on more vacations and live in a nicer house than I did).
Note that if you don’t want to merge your finances like a married couple, I’d recommend something simpler like “you pay a disproportionate amount on shared expenses but keep everything else separate”. I don’t advise trying to be halfway-married, either do it or don’t.
The way I’m thinking about doing this if I get married is to categorize things like this:
All money goes into a shared account
The shared account pays shared expenses like the mortgage, vacations, dates, house things and groceries
We each get some amount deposited in a personal account (in my case, the same amount for each of us) which we can spend on whatever we want (personal meals, clothes, alcohol, etc.)
Everything else goes into long-term savings
A simpler version would be to drop the shared account, put more money in the personal accounts, and each pay half for shared things. I would expect it to be more problematic though, since then you run into problems like “what if my partner blows all of their money on alcohol and doesn’t pay rent”. The intent of this setup with shared expenses first and then personal accounts is to make it so neither of us has any reason to care what the other does with their personal account. It would also just be more annoying having to constantly split things.
I imagine that shared vacation and dates may sometimes cause problems if one person wants to go on more vacations or dates than the other. I think the best way to handle this is to just discuss expectations rather than changing the financial setup though, since solutions like “the partner who likes vacations spends their personal fund on vacations for both partners” are probably not going to make them happy.
Groceries are another one where there could be complexity based on how similar your grocery needs are, but I think there’s generally a lot of overlap and I don’t expect the differences to be large enough to be worth paying attention to. Your situation may be different if you don’t agree on food at all, especially if the prices of what you want are wildly different.
The “everything else goes into long-term savings” part is potentially specific to me, but this is what I want to do with my spare money anyway, so I don’t mind if I’m disproportionately paying for this.
A previous setup I did was:
I paid for rent, most groceries, and vacations
For everything else, we kept our own income in personal accounts
This went badly because my partner had no incentive to keep any of the costs I paid down (unsurprisingly, they wanted to go on more vacations and live in a nicer house than I did).
Note that if you don’t want to merge your finances like a married couple, I’d recommend something simpler like “you pay a disproportionate amount on shared expenses but keep everything else separate”. I don’t advise trying to be halfway-married, either do it or don’t.