As the title suggests, my husband and I are recently married and expecting a baby(!), and although we have been living together for a while now and have a system that works reasonably well for just us, we are beginning to talk about merging our day-to-day finances in a more systematic way in preparation for baby. We know a lot about how to manage as individuals, but in preparation for more discussion on the topic, I thought I'd reach out for some advice.
Currently:
I am a graduate student and my husband works at a tech firm. When I graduate later in the summer, I will make around $65k per year, and my husband makes around $225k, including an annual bonus.
We have a mortgage that we’ll share payments for, and I have significant student loan debt that I’ll have to start paying toward once I graduate. Other than this we have no debt (cars paid off, etc).
Right now, we have entirely separate banking and retirement accounts and contribute by percentage share of income to shared expenses, but my husband would prefer to move to a 50/50 system when I start my new job, because he feels like it’s fair that everyone should pay equally, not necessarily according to income. He recognizes that is in some ways impractical (I told him early in our relationship that I’d be willing to do that, but we would have had to significantly downgrade our standard of living to accommodate my graduate student income), so we’re looking at splitting some expenses 50/50 and some by income, but haven’t worked out the details. Any thoughts on ways to potentially break that down, especially with a baby on the way would be welcome. In addition to expenses, he would also prefer to keep emergency and retirement savings separate.
Questions:
What do we need to most consider now that we're expecting a baby? Can we plan for baby expenditures without a shared budget?
Does anyone know of an existing model or system for partially split expenses that we could look to as a possible template?
How can we best make our money work for us in the long run if we keep everything relatively separate?
Edit: Thanks everyone so far for the advice- this is really helpful. I'm working, but will reply to some individual comments in a bit. But just to clarify one thing- I was attempting to leave the r/relationships stuff out of the post, and may not have explained well as a result. My husband has some trust issues around money from some family stuff that he acknowledges has nothing to do with me, so I think it's more the idea of a 50/50 split, and the security of knowing there is money that just belongs to him that feels appealing to him, and it's less about squeezing as much out of me as he can. He's a good guy, and he wouldn't let us struggle, but I agree there might be a less stressful way to go about splitting things up that could have the same emotional/security effect and be easier on us as a family. Understanding how other people manage things is really helpful.
Submitted June 12, 2018 at 09:46AM by MinorGraces https://ift.tt/2l5KZ0u
