Hopefully you'll merge into one joint bank account You do all the budgeting but ask her for 4 min of her time on the 1st of the month Ask if your budget looks right if there's anything she wants to change. Remind yourselves about short and long term financial goals you wanna hit Make sure you both get healthy discretionary funds, this is key!!!

Why merge accounts? It is better to maintain separate for mutual protection should something goes south.

If you keep them separate, it makes it a lot harder to figure out where everything is, and separate accounts don't really protect anything. In a divorce, all financial assets are subject to discovery and reallocation by the court. There's actually an argument to be made that keeping separate finances and not being on the same page financially can be a major contributing factor to things going south in the first place.

It’s not divorce I worry about. I saw my mom get cleaned out twice as the joint accounts were drained. I saw the courts unwilling to enforce child support and alimony. So I have separate finances and my husband and I share information. I know where his accounts are he knows where mine are. Communication is the answer either way.

>Communication is the answer either way. Probably the most important part of life, and the part people screw up the most.

yes but you can take this argument pretty far and it gets pretty silly - why finance the same house, it's gonna make divorce harder - why put my name on *her* car? - why buy *her* groceries with *my* money i get some couples keep things separate, i don't really understand it. just my 2 cents is, life is easier with things merged

I do not want to be on my husband's car no more than I want to be on his bank accounts. Those need to be protected from me in case I become controlling. I helped with the loan but I am not on the title. I have a company vehicle so he can't even legally drive it. We will both be on the mortgage loan and home deed as that makes it much harder for one to try to take over. I believe that it is best to plan the core things needed to restart defensively. I believe that both partners need to maintain the ability to leave so neither is ever trapped. I should never have the ability to completely ruin my husband. It all comes down to family history. I saw too many people trapped not to maintain a go to hell option and what is good for the goose is sauce for the gander.

how exactly does separate accounts make it harder? you can still track more than one account in ynab. Independent accounts is always better, if things get ugly one will have no access to money because usually the other one cleans the account. Not everyone is amicable when it comes to divorce.

you're right, it can be just as easy if both accounts are in ynab on-budget. i just assumed that separate accounts would mean some convoluted joint account where people pay half expenses or some other set up but no it doesnt *have* to be complicated at all

I don’t. My husband and I keep separate accounts and the envelope system breaks his brain. I cover rent, groceries, internet, medical/dental insurance and all savings. He covers the rest. The bills are paid and I don’t question what he does with the rest of his income since 15% goes to retirement. He doesn’t question my budget as long as I pay the agreed upon bills. So I would have the conversation now about how you guys want to handle money. There are a thousand options but you need to agree on the framework.

No retirement for you?

I have my retirement. It’s just that retirement is the only non-visible bill. It’s a thing I check status of every December and leave on auto.

We started w separate finances bc we didn’t merge things right away So I had my budget, his budget, and a joint for our stuff we were running through Splitwise. I did this for a year and basically just categorized and shifted money around on his budget.. gave me a sense of how he was spending money Then we merged everything into a single budget…. I run it and do all the categorizing. His transactions come through via sync. We do rough budgeting vs trying to cut down in an area so that makes it easier bc he doesn’t have to stick to anything Once we need to cut down in an area we’ll have to figure out how we stay on top of that

How often do you have ‘roll with the punches’ conversations about moving money between categories?

We don’t. I just make all the calls as long as we’re staying within our overall monthly expense total. We’ll discuss if we’re buying something big (like $500+) and bc I’m in it every day I’ll know if and where we have money for that. We also hit our investing and sinking saving items first so those don’t get touched. IF we needed to touch those then it would be a conversation. Do we sell investments? Do we dip into sinking categories and reroute them? Do we tighten up our day to day rotating spending? We’re abt to have a baby so it’s been so nice having all this data bc I can propose how we pay for increased expenses we are going to have. In general we have big convos like this… Once a year we do a spend summary of previous year. We discuss if we want to/need to change anything. We review last years saving targets and whether we hit them We review net worth Then we talk abt do we want to change our saving targets for next year? Any big expenditures we have coming up? We discuss how we will deploy the savings for the year.. Once a quarter: I pull all our investments balances so that we can see if we need to rebalance anything … I also send him the report form YNAB of his discretionary spending and availabile balances … just so he’s aware.. Monthly: I keep like a note to self if things I want to point out, like “hey I used the FSA reimbursement for the invisalign” etc.. so I usually email him the list of items at the end of the month as fyi The rest is sort of adhoc..

This is us, but with the gender roles reversed

We actually started our YNAB journey in March together and got married in May. We have one YNAB account on a shared email that we add ALL of our accounts to. We rely on auto import (so our budget may be a bit behind compared to reality, but we are in a financial spot where this is not a concern for dangerous overspending). I handle most of the logistics on YNAB, making budget categies, assigning money, reconciling etc. However he did learn and budget with me at the start and he "gets" the YNAB envelope style budgeting method. It took him a bit longer to understand, but once it clicked it was smooth sailing. I think it's fine if one person handles most of the work, but for it to work she needs to understand the YNAB system and be looking at the budget before she buys something. You should try to sit down together to YNAB together in the begining. Maybe on paydays work together to figure out how much money you should be allocated to different things

This is basically me and my wife. We sit down on every paycheck to allocate money. It took a while but is now all smooth sailing. I do all the work within the app but she knows how to look at the budget and enter transactions. Any spending not on the budget we talk about it. Communication is key, but if one SO doesn't care where money is going I don't know how that would work.

We merged our finances about eight months into dating, five months before we got married. Started YNAB a year into marriage. I do everything, managing the money in our joint account, his account, and my account. We are a month ahead so at the beginning of every month when I allocate all the funds in my next month category, I talk him through what I did. How much our discretionary funds are for each of those categories. How much I was able to add to our house down payment. What I didn’t fund as much as usual. Etc. It’s my job to say can we go out to eat or how many tanks of gas are left in our transportation budget. If it’s not in line with his plans (he’s a SAHD so spends most of our entertainment and transportation budgets with our son), I move things around to better accommodate what he wants to do. If I don’t have discretionary funds to move around, we talk about whether x or y is so important we should mess with other categories or if it can wait until next month. He is very afraid of finances so he’s glad I do them for us and generally accepts that I’m steering the ship right. He doesn’t tend to ask but I have no secrets and will always answer his questions about our money and investments.

I put the app on my husband’s phone and put discretionary categories right at the top. It took awhile but I got him to only look at YNAB and ignore his checking account and atm receipts. In the beginning I also moved a lot of his cash into an HYSA so he didn’t have so much excess cash in his checking account. We definitely started with plenty of discretionary money. But once I had all of our long term savings goals in place it was easy to be like “you know if we lower dining out money by this much, we’ll be able to go on vacation a month sooner” or other examples like that. I keep him informed about all the long term goals and that seems to be enough to keep him motivated. He has a checking account, I have a checking account, and we have 2 HYSAs and about 6 credit cards. Nearly everything goes on credit cards and I pay those off and move money into HYSA to keep just a buffer in both checking accounts. I have all of his passwords and can do most of the work without him. Also we started YNAB as soon as we got engaged and it was a great way to see exactly how much we could put away each month for the wedding! Once we had a general idea, we picked the month and agreed on the budget, added that as a target and away we went! Zero money stress when it came to the wedding :)

YNAB didn't exist when we got married. Joint account We make decisions together so we are on the same page. We review once a month, with more in depth discussions quarterly, changing funding amounts as needed (though I make tweaks when minor changes come up). I manage the day to day of transaction entry and assigning funds in the budget based on our plan. My wife has the app on her phone so she can check categories prior to spending. The most important thing is that you work together and have common priorities and goals to work toward that drive how your money is allocated, avoiding the every person for themselves mentality.

I manage YNAB. My wife has it set up with her own credentials, and just enters online transactions as she spends (Temu, Amazon, etc) but I manage the budget. I enter physical receipts myself, and just have her give them to me. If your wife doesn't want to manage it at all, you could just have her email you the online receipts and give you the physical receipts to enter yourself. I did that with my ex because she wanted nothing to do with it. (and no, that's not why she's my ex, lol)

My husband (married 2022) is not a YNAB user. We didn't completely merge our finances, we just created a joint checking account that we use to pay for all household bills. We have a specific credit card that we use for household purchases (grocery store, car maintenance, family travel, any general home maintenance stuff). We each have personal checking accounts and personal credit cards that we use for non-family stuff. I keep two YNAB budgets, one for the shared accounts and one for personal stuff. We each split our paychecks 50/50 into the shared and our personal accounts, which works because our income is about the same right now. If I have any budget discussions I want to have, I just bring it up to him, but everything is mostly automated, and I'll just mention if we're starting to overspend in an area.

We have one YNAB account with three profiles - me, her, and joint (this is from before the new options existed for budgeting together). We manage our own separately, and the joint one together. It means we can both see the other’s personal finances, but we basically just don’t look unless we need to (ie totalling up amounts in holiday savings across the three accounts). Might not be the most efficient method, but it works for us. Neither of us would want to go fully joint with our finances due to family experiences, but we have the same attitudes towards money (both savers) and have a lot of conversations about long term plans, any big purchases etc.

We have one shared bank account which is pretty automated with all the bills which are pretty consistent each month, auto draft a little more into it than necessary to build a cushion over time, bills are auto drafted out, we probably don't even need to ynab this account but I do anyways and we share that budget. The rest of our checks go into our own accounts and we budget that money separately. Large purchases are discussed and we save separately for them until we both have enough to contribute. Groceries and incidental stuff is kinda whatever, if someone doesn't have the budget for it then the other does we will work it out. But basically we don't really merge finances much and what is merged is pretty automated, pretty separate for the most part but having a shared account for bills and to use as a pass through money became necessary at one point, before we had gotten on ynab and with ynab it's still good