What are your favorite hacks for splitting living and going-out expenses with your partner? The situation can often be tricky since we make 10x more than our SO. What is the most fair treatment that doesn't incentivise the lower earner to overspend but equally doesn't make them feel inferior?
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Both of our paychecks get direct deposited to the same bank account and then we pay for everything out of that. Easy peasy.
My wife and I had same approach @Skinnayyy has for the first few years, way before we were married.
Then she joined a bank which made her have her own account for payroll, so we ended up with notionally split finances, although I'm the book keeper/accountant in the relationship, have all the accounts passwords and move money around as/when we need to.
These days, I keep our generally separate, largely as she wants to support her parents and, should she die, I want to be able to clearly identify her cash and assets so that I can set those up to support her parents and brother's family (she has no will, so all that stuff goes to me as her husband). We've also got our property investments set up so that the rent income from some real estate is used for specific family support purposes rather than coming back into our general pool of funds.
Also, I do all the securities investing in our relationship, I don't consult her on that, so I want to only play with my money so that she doesn't suffer any losses from trades she doesn't have a say in.
We don't keep a ledger of our respective positions and we've treated our relationship as a partnership since we moved in together years before we married. The aim of maximising each other's happiness rather than economic contribution.
So I've always paid all rent and utilities, as I've always earned more and she'd end up forgetting to pay on time, but there's no sense that she owes me ~$0.5-0.7m for 13 years of me paying all this.
When it comes to paying for dinners etc, we're indifferent who pays, as we see it as coming out of the partnership pocket either way.
We've also discuss whether we, as a partnership, could afford to have one of us take a few years off to get an extra university degree and start a new, lower paying career (end decision: yes, but work is pretty interesting at the moment, so no need).
If I took a purely economic view, I'd probably feel ripped off because I've always earned significantly more, I pay the lion's share of expenses, I do almost all of the housework, plus I do all the book keeping.
On the other hand, I'm with this lady because I love her and she maximises my life enjoyment, not for $ profit maximisation. Plus she still earns a lot of money.
Also also, I keep meticulous paperwork. Should we ever get divorced, it shouldn't be hard to reconstruct an even split (or even a pro rata to income contribution split), leaving me with a nice fat divorce settlement cheque.
Best way I've ever seen people manage finances is my mother's method. She and her husband (my step dad) have their own earnings, which are kept 100% separate. For paying cable bills, property taxes, utilities, and any other co-used expense item they make a monthly transfer into a shared bank account. For dinners, they pay their own way. Granted, they both make approximately the same amount of money, but they have entirely separate financial lives.
The #1 reason for divorce is disagreements over how to manage money. When you split your finances into totally separate pools it prevents disagreements over money. Since my step dad spends money like a drunken sailor, this has saved their marriage. My step dad can buy all the cars and motorcycles he wants without my mother giving a damn.
It's more convenient to split the fixed costs but better incentives wise for you to pay (more of) the fixed bills and split going out and other luxuries.
This is assuming you are wanting to pay more than her.
My gf and I split proportionally based on income. We have a joint credit account and both of us have a credit card with access to it. At the end of the month we split it in proportion to our incomes, which is 85/15. Sometimes doesn't seem exactly fair as we can go out and get a $50 dinner and she ends up paying $7 of that at the end of the month, but I couldn't come up with a better way of doing it. Any other split wouldn't allow us to go on nice vacations and fun weekend trips.
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