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My observation of couples with split finances (my wife and I merged ours long ago) is that it doesn’t seem to prevent the kind of problems it nominally solves, and adds extra stress to the mix.

If you are married to someone whose financial decisions you are incompatible with, there’s no escaping the fact that you’re going to be impacted by those decisions one way or another no matter what. Hiding them in a for-his/her-eyes-only account creates more stress because now you’re constantly worried about what invisible bad decisions they might be making that will impact you later.

It feels like a bandaid fix to the underlying problem of financial incompatibility, and that failing to address the root problem creates stress and challenges down the road.

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Stated differently, it is a technical solution to a social problem.

I'd posit that it is plausible you could both be compatible with multiple accounts for different uses. Especially as you get fortunate enough to have enough income that you can split where it is deposited, there is no reason "joint account" means a single joint account.

that's a good point, we never formally merged our accounts, but my wife told me the pins to most of her debit cards. i don't know if i told her mine, but that's because the need to do that just never came up. so even though nominally the accounts are separate, in practice we treat all of them as shared.

split finances doesn’t seem to prevent the kind of problems it nominally solves

nor does it create them. my wife and i have separate bank accounts but we don't have a trust issue. payments are made by whoever is doing it from their account. if an account is low on money we just move some without any regards as to whose money it is or who earned it.

So you have two shared accounts instead of one?

pretty much, yes, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36766676

Same. My wife doesn't work but often sells goods or something and gets money via paypal. She likes one bank app, I like another, for starters.

We put all actual spending on credit cards, that I pay off each month from mine. So this isn't like an allowance based thing.

Sometimes she needs cash or to write a check, instant transfer. We don't go snooping through each others records, surprises are nice sometimes :).

I don't see at all what joint could add here. I'm very particular about checking accounts after getting overdraft scarred as a teen like most people my age. I also invest rather aggressively so don't want too much money sitting idle. It becomes much harder to do if we joined accounts, one surprise forgotten about check or draft could cause the house payment to fail, for example.

That doesn't sound like split finances. You're just using multiple bank accounts.

fair point. maybe split income and shared expenses. i don't know. other people here seem to consider any form of a personal account to be split finances. my personal expenses usually come from my account and hers come from her account. so in practice it's hard to tell the difference. what is different is the attitude towards money.

that said, i made sure that my personal expenses were covered by my own income. my wife used to earn more than me so she covered the main living expenses and i contributed a bit. but when i replaced my broken camera or my old computer, it all came from my account. i didn't even discuss those significant expenses with her because they were needed anyways, and not getting them was not an option. i would have had to discuss it if i didn't have enough money myself but urgently needed it (though in those two cases i would have waited until i saved up enough).

I think that split finances solve the incompatibility problem for the legal system and banks, and not the couple involved.

I think it’s great to have a healthy relationship with trust.

What if I told you that there was a strategy that had a 50% risk of what you think is trust is actually deceit. And that having separate finances helps immensely in the situation where this risk is realized.

I have friends who were comfortable and thought all was well for years or even decades. Then it wasn’t. And having commingled finances was unpleasant in that it made divorce and the financial mistakes that much harder to reconcile through years of trial.

Tl;dr; it’s hard to take marriage advice from someone who hasn’t been married for 70 years. It’s like someone saying “this architecture is the best, it’s run for six months without any problems.”

Separate checking accounts mean absolutely nothing during a divorce. It’s all considered marital property and is split. That along with “your” retirement savings, physical property etc.

If my wife and I got divorced, our joint checking accounts is the least of my complications.

I’ve got retirement accounts and two properties (our former primary home that’s rented out and our vacation property) and since we agreed for her to stop working in 2020, I would end up paying alimony.

I did get a divorce before when I had three properties and a 401K. Luckily none of the houses had any equity of note and I was a simple matter of giving my ex cash out of my 401K (a QDRO)

That is true at the end of a divorce, but in the beginning, possession is a very big deal. With a joint account, one partner can legally drain the entire account to a new personal one, and the other partner has no recourse other than court, which is slow.

This is a highly assymetric risk for a lot of couples. If one of the was the sole source of income, they are in a much better position to wait for the court to intervene.

This is assuming the money is still there at the end. The offending partner could attempt to hide it. Or they could have genuinely spent it.

> Separate checking accounts mean absolutely nothing during a divorce

This is not true. They mean a lot during the divorce. They mean little at resolution. But the first orders are for status quo and so using your own account and keeping it during the divorce means you have more control and visibility.

Yes, parties can file motions to access and compel payment. But divorce isn’t like on tv, family courts are slow.

With joint accounts it’s easy for one person to drain the cash and do something stupid like spend $75k on fake expenses that take two years to sort out.

With separate accounts, this is not possible.

The assets in accounts are split in community property states. But that’s at resolution and a lot of harm can happen during the course of drawn out disagreements.

Cash flow is important during a divorce (especially one that takes a few years) so feel free to consult with a divorce attorney or a prenup attorney. This is not an issue for illiquid assets and accounts like real estate and 401ks.

Is my experience so unique? I went from filing divorce to going to court and getting divorced in less than 4 months.

It was uncontested and no kids - well I had a step daughter - and we had only been married four years.

It is relatively unique, but not THAT unique. In my experience, kids matter a lot in this - as kids give leverage over one or both parties that is not easy to sort out and is long lasting. Both visitation/custody, legal (claims of abuse), and money (child support).

Divorces without kids are not guaranteed to be any picnic either, but kids often ramps it waaaay up.

What if I told you that there was a strategy that had a 50% risk of what you think is trust is actually deceit

can you explain that please? or give an example. i don't understand what you are trying to say here.

50% of marriages end in divorce. Note this varies wildly by income. So your "risk" goes down the richer you are.

sure, but i don't get how trust is actually deceit in those cases. people divorce for many reasons. deceit is not always the issue. and intuitively i'd think that deceit is more likely the richer you are.

Deceit is not always the reason, but it frequently is. It’s rather unpleasant to find out that years of seemingly trusting time together wasn’t.

i was going to argue about statistics, but i think that's pointless. i am guessing that you or someone you know were deceived by their partner, which understandably reflects in how you think about it. you, or they, have my sympathy.

but please allow me to ask for one more clarification:

i would only call something deceit if it was the intention to marry someone in order to take advantage of them from the beginning. is that what you mean? or do you count a change much later as well?

Sometimes it's clear that one or both parties were willfully deceiving themselves and/or the other party. Sometimes it's that they were unconsciously deceiving themselves or the other party.

I know some folks who are getting divorced because 2 years into the relationship, one of them realized they were trans.

Someone else, it was 18 years in and after having (and raising) a kid together.

I used to work with someone that realized they were a lesbian after being married 25 years and raising a child together with their (male) spouse.

For the other party, it can be a bit difficult to not see that as some kind of deception. It certainly changes 'the deal' pretty dramatically.

Knowing a bit about what was going on, I was also seeing signs of emotional abuse in one or both parties that was concerning, and may have played a part. It's not normal for someone to have PTSD type reactions to basic office human interaction, for instance. They insisted things were fine though.

Other times it's patterns of infidelity that come out much later, or actions that start once the 'ink is dry' that are deeply manipulative and destructive. Like 'oh honey, that's great that we're married now. Oh, I forgot to tell you about that $70k in credit card debt I just ran up.'.

Other times, it's things like 'marrying for love', then leaving once the green card arrives, or have their degree paid off, etc.

Or they're building multiple lives without anyone knowing - until someone finds out.

Or they get deeply controlling and abusive once they feel they get enough leverage.

Or they start screaming at their partner and stabbing the counter with a butcher knife because the other partner asked them if they were ok one too many times....

Or any number of things.

People are... messy.

If for some reason you have a reason to spend time in family court (if so, I'm deeply sorry), watch the other cases. It can be very informative. The reality is VERY different from how it is usually portrayed. Especially if you have EQ and can read between the lines a bit.

My recent 'favorite' being the Mom who had a valid restraining order against her (due to prior incidents) who decided to violate it to the point she physically stepped on and hurt the fathers mom in front of their daughter and disrupted their daughters school event to the point she had to be physically escorted out by security. She got scolded by the judge for violating said order - and receiving no other penalty.

Despite admitting to it in open court, TO THE JUDGE, and actually adding details that made it clear it was even worse. After the father hesitatingly brought it up.

Eye opening is one way of putting it.

I’ve been married for 53 years; we share our accounts and have never had any problems.

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