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Comment by hemancuso | Hacker News Reader

I, personally, have a hard time imagining a successful marriage without a shared pool of income. Paying one another to do chores or evaluating each other's fiscal contribution to nearly every decision seems insane.

Who pays for college? Who pays for food? Maternity leave? Career switching. This list goes on.

Good luck.

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It does seem insane. It also seems like it's working quite well!

Having separate finances is not exactly a new idea, plenty of people do that. My partner and I have completely separate finances, but equally share expenses like food, housing, repairs, etc. Works fine for us!

I guess you have about the same income then? Or do you "tax" each other an equal percentage?

Why does it matter? They'd have to mutually agree on the shared expenses, and agree on the splitting.

If they get a house they both want, and both can afford, they split 50/50.

Hypothetically, I'm guessing that if whoever made more income wanted a nicer place than the other, they could pay an agreed proportion more (eg, 60/40)

Indeed, that's the Joint Purchase Auction we talk about here: http://messymatters.com/autonomy

The money aspect of this seems more of an honesty check than anything else.

It's not like a... wait. I just had an idea. Could a roommate of theirs live off of yootling? Bidding well, a person could more or less do their busy work for them, get "paid" for it, and use those payments to subsidize their costs of living!

Anyway, what I was going to say was that the money aspect of this seems mostly as a way to keep the bets honest. You don't really want wild bets of, say, $1,000,000 or whatever, because then fair market value for the activity becomes impossible to assess.

Or something like that. The person with the PhD should probably explain it.

Could a roommate of theirs live off of yootling?

You mean, could a roommate of theirs work as a live-in maid?

I'm their roommate/ employee. I get paid an extremely generous hourly wage. I don't yootle with them too often, but when I do it's usually a chance to make extra money for a particularly unfun task (like waking up early to drive them to the airport). I usually appreciate the opportunity.

It also helps me figure out how much I value things, because my default is to be pretty noncommittal with my preferences, and this forces me to recognize them and make them explicit.

Thanks for mentioning "yootling", as otherwise I would never have found (noticed?) his wife's guest article on the same subject [0]. It was a nice complementary article.

In that article, she mentions in passing the general case. From this, it seems like it would totally work with three people.

  There are n participants, each with some share — i.e., 
  some fraction — of a decision. Everyone submits a sealed bid, 
  the second highest of which is taken to be the Fair Market 
  Price (FMP). The high bidder wins, and buys out everyone else’s 
  shares, i.e., pays them the appropriate fraction of the FMP.

A caveat is, some things you wouldn't want someone to bid for -- putting the kids to bed -- but other than those kinds of things, I suspect that they would not mind in the slightest if a roommate wanted to subsidize their rent by doing dishes or laundry.

My biggest question is how to handle this when the household has a single source of income.

0: http://messymatters.com/autonomy/

I think if I were to give this a try it would have to be in a situation where we pool incomes and each get an allowance of "mad money". The money to pay each other for chores would come out of the mad money.

My husband and I have separate accounts, but we have access to them, if that make sense. We split shared expenses (example, he pays electricity, I pay cell phone). We split rent. We take turns paying for groceries or other shared items, depending on budget (One pays for groceries for a while after the other just paid for tuition/big purchase/other). We trust eachother that money is managed well and will run numbers by eachother when we feel it is needed. The biggest thing is communication, especially about expectations.

I was thinking the same thing. Surely it is virtual money. If my wife paid me $100 to do something all that really matters is that I wouldn't have to hit the ATM for a bit.

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