Something that I don't see being discussed very often is the matter of Financial Fidelity. For this discussion, I will definine it as "The degree of responsibility and transparency/honesty which an individual has towards combined finances, which he or she accumulates and invests with a partner/SO".
Financial infidelity would be to operate these shared finances without consulting the partner, possibly to act in an irresponsible and/or selfish manner, often followed by lies and deception to prevent the partner from discovering the infidelity and its effects on the combined finances (which I will call "Couple Savings" from now on)
I'm not in a relationship, but my attention was drawn to this matter as the current events related to certain volatile stocks produced terrible outcomes. Among these, I was particularly shocked by the amount of people who took large ammounts of money from their Couple Savings (without the other partner's consent or even their awareness ) to gamble on these stocks, and were met with crushing losses. Posts were either written by the ones breaking the trust and who were now desperate at the inevitable need to explain what happened to the SO, or the SO her/himself describing their panic at discovery.
I noticed that most of the infidelity cases I've read were caused by male partners, breaking female partner's trust. Men seem to believe they have a better grasp on finances and money than their Girlfriends/Wives, and think they have no need to talk with them before making financial decisions. They appear to see themselves as capable of making a genius move to surprise their SOs with absurds amounts of money and expensive gifts. Perhaps a good intention corrupted by an inflated ego. I have witnessed a similar culture on my own family, where men tend to believe that they know how to make and invest money while the women don't. The funny thing is that, if they heard their wives advice, they would have avoided most of their worst losses. The results is that some of the woman decide, rightly so, to keep some of their earnings from their husbands, and protect it from the stupidity of their partners. Because of this, I believe that financial infidelity should be a very important risk for woman to consider in relationships.
Thinking about this, what are the strategies which you use or plan to use when consolidating a relationship, in order to create Couple Savings while also protecting your own wealth as an individual? Which rules do you consider essential when dealing with shared finances and investments? Do you even consider Shared Finances necessary? If not, why?
Submitted February 21, 2021 at 12:38AM by _BubbleRider_ https://ift.tt/3qEZJnl
