How to merge finances with a partner (without losing your mind)
Last week, we tackled the should you merge finances? debate. This week, we’re getting into the nitty-gritty: how to actually do it.
Merging finances sounds simple until you’re in the thick of it and wondering:
How do we split expenses fairly?
What do we do about savings?
Who’s in charge of paying the bills?
Do we need a joint account? Multiple accounts? None??
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the logistics, we’ve been there. And today, we’re walking you through how to set up a system that actually works for you and your partner.
We’re covering:
🏦 The three ways couples split finances (fully merged, partially merged, or separate)
📊 How to divide bills in a way that feels fair — whether that’s 50/50 or proportional to income
🛠️ The best ways to structure your bank accounts (without making it a logistical nightmare)
📅 How to set up systems for checking in on money and adjusting as needed
📚 Resources to help you go even deeper, including Money for Couples by Ramit Sethi and Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach
There’s no “right” way to handle money in relationships—only what works for you. So tune in, take notes, and send this episode to your partner!
🎧 Listen now!
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Transcript
[00:00:00]
Cassidy: Hello to all the girlies out there. Last week we talked about whether you should merge finances with a partner, and this week [00:01:00] we are diving into how to actually do it. And this is one of those things that sounds really simple until you start doing it, and suddenly you're asking questions like, How do we split expenses fairly? What do we do about savings? Who's in charge of making sure the bills get paid? And if you're feeling overwhelmed by the logistics, we've been there, done that.
So today we're going to walk you through how to set up a system intentionally that works for both you and your partner.
Emily: Yeah. And the first step to doing this is to decide how you want to merge finances. And this is kind of a review of actually what we talked about last week. So if you haven't listened to our previous episode go back and give that a listen, cause we go into a lot more detail. But before you do anything, before we get into, like, the logistics of splitting bills and who's on what bank account, you need to decide how much you actually want to merge.
So, there are three main ways you can go about this. One is fully merging your [00:02:00] accounts. So having only shared accounts, all income goes into one account that you both own, and all expenses come from that account as well.
The second approach is what we'll call partially merged, or the yours, mine, and ours approach. And this is where some income goes into a shared account for bills, savings, other goals, but then you each keep a personal account for your individual spending.
And then the third approach is to not merge at all and keep everything separate. So you just split bills in a way that makes sense for you. But you each manage your own money.
So even if you're going that third route and keeping your finances separate, it's still worth listening to this episode because we'll go into how to exactly figure out how to split your bills in a way that feels equitable for you as a couple.
Cassidy: So really, this first step is just kind of turning inward personally, and then also having a conversation with your partner about, like, how do we see [00:03:00] ourselves combining finances and in what capacity? Right? So, like, step number one is just figuring out what's going to work for you, fully merged, fully separate, or some combination of this yours, mine, ours.
After that, though, the next step is, how are you going to split the bills? If you're taking the fully merged route, the answer to this is probably that you're going to view all of your money as your collective income, so it doesn't matter if one partner makes $100,000 a year and the other partner makes $40,000 a year, every dollar that flows into your account is your collective money to then put toward expenses, put toward savings goals. So, in that regard, it's pretty simple. And this step two probably doesn't even apply to you.
Emily: Mhm.
Cassidy: But, if you are naturally wondering, like, we're going to slightly merge or keep separate and I don't understand who pays for what or how we split that, we're going to walk you through [00:04:00] a few different ways that you could split expenses. And the frustrating part is there are a lot of different ways you can do this. This is just two examples, but it can get you thinking about what may or may not work for you.
So, the first thing, is just to split expenses 50/50. And this usually works best if your incomes are similar. Do you have any thoughts on that before I move on to the second one?
Emily: I think maybe talking about even the logistics of that, like, do you pay like one person pays the rent, and someone pays, groceries and utilities, or, like, you split everything with, Venmo down the middle. You know what I mean? I guess that's, like, categories within the 50/50 split, so maybe that's too much of a rabbit hole.
Cassidy: No, no, no. I think that's really good to talk about because I think that would be a natural next question of like, what does that actually look like?
Emily: Mm.
Cassidy: Um, your expenses are never going to be the same month to month. It's like if your household expenses are $4,000 a month on average, it's never going to be exactly $4,000 [00:05:00] a month.
But within that, let's say that you each have income funneling into separate individual bank accounts. If your incomes are similar, you could agree that, each of you are gonna move $2,000 a month of your paychecks into a shared account for shared expenses, since your average monthly expenses tend to be around $4,000, and then you could just use that one account for all of your shared expenses and call it a day. I, I feel like that would be one of the most hands-off-ish approaches.
Emily: Mmhmm.
Cassidy: Um, and if you didn’t want to do that, it could be like, I’m gonna pay for this group of bills which equals about $2,000 dollars and you can pay for this group of bills and it won't be perfect every month. But you're, you're just okay with that.
Emily: Yeah.
Cassidy: Um, or it could be even more granular and that's you being like, here's my half for rent. Here's my [00:06:00] half for groceries. Here's my half for this, which would be like the most hands-on approach.
Emily: Yeah, I think those second two, you're going to have to work out some version of those if you want to keep your finances separate from your partner because you won't have that joint account to pay those bills out of. So that's just like one more, one more way or one more level, I guess, you have to like think through this if you're going the 50/50 split route.
Cassidy: Yeah, I agree. Can you think of any other possibilities before we move on?
Emily: No, I feel like those are the most obvious. Either like taking on individual expenses, splitting roughly down the middle or reimbursing each other.
Cassidy: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah, I think that's about it.
Cassidy: Yeah, and it could be one of those things where if you're roughly splitting expenses, and you just have one month where one of you really does spend a lot more than the other one, then you can have a conversation and be like, this thing specifically was way more expensive this month [00:07:00] than what we like, budgeted for, I thought it would be on average, can we split the overage or something like that?
But the second way you can split expenses if your incomes aren't similar is to do a proportional split where you each contribute a percentage of your income to shared expenses. And. I'm going to give you, like, a tangible example of a proportional split.
So, let's say that Spouse A makes $60,000 a year. Spouse B makes $100,000 a year. Instead of splitting bills 50/50, because your incomes are so different, you can divide them up based on income.
So once again, if your household expenses are $4,000, Spouse A could pay 40% of the expenses and then Spouse B could pay the other 60%. And then once again, if you decide to do a proportional split, you can then decide, do we just want to figure out our average monthly expenses and move that to a shared account and just pay all of [00:08:00] shared expenses out of that one account? Do we want it to be more granular and hands-on than that?
You can then have that same conversation, as you would if you were doing, like, a 50/50 split.
Emily: Right. Yeah, and we'll get into those logistics of the accounts here in a second, but I think the proportional split is something a lot of people maybe don't think about because, kind of like the natural inclination, like, you know, going to a restaurant with, like, a friend or on a date or something is, like, to split the bill 50/50. And it's just, like, it feels equal. I mean, because it is equal.
But if you're not making the same salary as your partner or, like, maybe somebody stays home with kids and works part-time, or whatever, like, things just aren't going to be 50/50, and so this is a really good way to make things more equitable like, if not equal, and I think, for some people this, like, feels really natural, and for others, like, [00:09:00] especially the higher earner, it can maybe be a more, a little more challenging to like wrap your head around, but I think it's a great approach that's worth considering if you make a different income than your partner.
Cassidy: Yeah, because I think if you are the high income earner and you truly love your partner and want them to succeed in life, you also do not want them to struggle financially while you just have tons of disposable income every month.
Emily: Right.
Cassidy: Right? Like you want that to feel proportional in some way between you two, and so if your incomes are different, a lot of times the proportional split can be a little better. And in last week's episode, we read a few different threads from Reddit where people had talked about how they combine their finances and one person mentioned that they and their partner like, there's like a $30,000 difference between their two salaries.
And they made it seem like that was not a big deal for them, like it was relatively small. And so they said that the partner that makes about $30,000 more just pays a little bit more every month. And it sounded [00:10:00] like they didn't have, like, very rigid, I pay X percent and you pay X percent. But they were like, since you make a little bit more, just pay a little bit more. And so that can be another approach to, like, proportionally splitting if you don't want to get down into the granular, figuring out the percent.
Emily: Yeah, I think it's just whatever feels better, like…
Cassidy: Yeah.
Emily: If you have, if you start to have any, like, resentment for your partner because you feel, like, either, they're not contributing enough, or, like, you don't feel like you have enough to, yeah, spend on yourself. Just, you know, when those things start coming up, I think that's when maybe you need to get a little more granular.
It's different for everyone. Okay. Now the logistics. So if you're merging finances with a partner, you definitely need a system.
So we can start by talking about the first approach, which is fully merging your finances. So there are a couple things you can do here. [00:11:00] Cassidy mentioned in last week's episode that when she got married, her spouse closed his accounts that he had had individually before getting married, and they just added his name to her existing accounts because she wanted to keep them. So those accounts became joint accounts. So that's one way you can do it. You can choose somebody's accounts, add the other person's name to them, and close any extras.
Cassidy: I was going to add one little note here. I don't know how often if you're listening to this, like how often you contact your bank for things. But in my experience with Ally Bank, like, adding someone's name to my account and turning it into a joint account was very easy.
I do think had to maybe like, send them a digital copy of like, my marriage certificate or something, that may have honestly been for changing my last name though. They just required like a little piece of verification, but they were like, you're good. Everything's fine.
And then same with just like, opening a new bank account jointly., it’s just as easy as opening a new bank account on your own, except you'll need your partner's like, name and [00:12:00] Social Security number or ITIN. So it’s pretty easy.
Emily: Yeah, it is pretty easy. Yeah. And if it's not easy, then maybe choose a different bank because it should be easy.
Cassidy: That is so true. A short plug, a few episodes ago, we did a Q and A on bank accounts. If you wanna deep dive into the bank accounts that Emily and I have, why we love them, what to look for in your own bank account, give that episode a listen, but a big one is customer service. Like if you were calling customer service for help for combining accounts with a partner and they are not being helpful, that is a red flag.
Emily: Yep. Good point.
Okay. So if you do merge fully with your partner finance-wise you'll just want to make sure that all of your direct deposits are flowing into your new joint account. So that account should receive both people's paychecks, and then you also want to make sure all of your bills are being paid out of that joint account.
If you're doing the [00:13:00] yours, mine, and ours approach, or the partially merged approach you'll still want to open a joint account, so you'll probably want a joint checking account for shared bills and then a joint savings account for shared long-term savings goals.
And in this situation, so, this is what I shared in the previous episode, what my husband and I did. We each kept our individual checking accounts when we got married, but we opened a joint checking account for shared bills, and we opened a joint savings account for shared goals.
So, you can have your money flowing through the system in a couple of different ways. One of those ways, and this is what I do, is to have everyone's paycheck landing in the joint account. And then if you want, you can transfer money from the joint account into each partner's individual savings account every month for personal spending.
The other thing you could do [00:14:00] is have each partner's paychecks landing in their own individual checking accounts and then transferring a portion of that paycheck into the joint account for shared bills and expenses. Or into the savings account for shared goals.
Cassidy: I like to think of it as, like, how merged do you want to be? Like, if you want to be mostly merged, you're probably going to have everything funnel into a shared account, and then you're just going to move a little bit to your individual accounts as you want.
Emily: Right.
Cassidy: But if you want to only be a little bit merged, you're probably going to do the opposite and still have everything flow into your individual accounts and then just move whatever you need to into a shared.
Emily: Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. And quick pro tip, say you, you and your partner mostly merge your finances and both of your paychecks end up in a joint account, if you each get like $200 of individual fun money each month, you can most likely set up an automatic transfer from that joint account into each of your individual [00:15:00] accounts. I think you can do this with most banks, but just, like, set up a recurring transfer that happens every month for the same amount of money. So you don't have to like, worry about logging in every month and doing that transfer manually.
Cassidy: That's a good tip.
So those are kind of the logistics of all the different ways you could merge your finances. If you have any follow up questions about that, please email us, hello at thefinancegirlies. com. If something was unclear, you have a comment, whatever, we would love to hear from you.
But even after you've merged finances, it's equally as important to, like, keep checking in with your partner and adjusting your system as needed. Because merging finances is something that you'll continue to fine tune over time. And so we wanted to take a moment now to give some suggestions for how you could make sure that your system keeps working for you both.
And so the first suggestion, we have three of them. [00:16:00] Suggestion number one is to schedule a money check-in. So set up a recurring time, maybe it's every Sunday, like once a week, maybe it's once a month, whatever works for you, to sit down and go over your finances together and use this time to look at your income, expenses, and savings goals. Discuss any financial stressors that have come up. Like Emily mentioned, if you find yourself feeling resentful, have that difficult conversation with your partner. Um, a quote that I heard a long time ago that I love is that, I would rather feel guilty for speaking up than resentful for not speaking at all. And that's kind of my personal litmus, litmus test of like, if I find myself being resentful, it's kind of my cue to be like, even though it feels hard, start nudging this into conversations because it's important to you for a reason.
Emily: Right.
Cassidy: So use that money check-in to do that, and then also adjust as needed. Maybe one of you gets a [00:17:00] raise. Maybe one of you goes on maternity or paternity leave. Maybe your expenses change, like whatever. Use that time to make some adjustments.
Emily: Yeah. And you can also, I, I mean, this gets into maybe like broader budgeting, but say like, one partner has some big expense that's like really important to them. And like, maybe you need to adjust your allocations for like a few months in order to accommodate that so it can also include those kinds of conversations, too. Um, I'm thinking of an example.
My husband, it ended up not working out, but he was really excited about like a carpentry, not carpentry, woodworking, a woodworking class, and we're hoping he gets to do it in the future, it just didn't work out this time, but the expense for that was gonna be like, way more than our, like, monthly fun money.
Cassidy: Yeah.
Emily: But like, we're happy to, like, make that adjustment for a month, you know, to [00:18:00] accommodate that expense.
So, yeah, it's a good time to, like, think about your kind of individual fun money too and how that's working for you and how you both feel about it and any changes you need to make.
Cassidy: Yeah, that reminds me like, our fun money categories have adjusted over time, but whenever we were like, aggressively paying off debt, both earning a very low income, really trying to squeak by on as little as we could, our fun money was like, $25 to $50 a month and then gradually over time, as we've gotten more, like, financially comfortable and our incomes have increased, you know, we've had to have those conversations, like, in these money check-in situations where we're, like, $100 feels really restrictive to only have to spend on myself every month. Like, I’m thinking $250 would feel cozier and, like, a better option. So yeah, like another example of having those conversations. Or maybe you've given yourself, like, a wide berth to spend, but you're realizing you're not hitting your savings goals. And one of you is [00:19:00] feeling like, like, you're not hitting your savings goals as quickly as you want to. So then you can have a conversation of, how can we adjust how we're currently using our system to, like, find a happy medium where we feel like we're hitting these goals a little faster.
Emily: Yeah. That's a good point.
Cassidy: Yeah. Oh. That was our second tip, actually. Revisit your goals. Yeah, so just because you start with one system doesn't mean you have to stick with it forever. If one of you is feeling frustrated, tweak the system. Like we, yeah, that was step two.
Emily: Yeah. Nice.
Cassidy: And then the third tip folds into this nicely, and it's just to continue to keep communication open because no one wants to feel controlled or completely disconnected from their money. If your system is working well, that is really great. But if not, keep tweaking it until it feels fair and stress-free for you both.
Emily: Mmm.
Cassidy: Yeah.
Emily: I wanted to say something that came to mind as we were chatting about this and doing this episode is like, we keep saying the system that works best is like [00:20:00] what works for each couple and individual, but I do want to like throw out one caveat that's like, if what feels comfortable is like, one partner handling everything and the other one just kind of hiding from money, I want to challenge you to try a different approach because I think that's a common dynamic among couples is like, someone worries about the money or doesn't worry about the money, but like, handles, in quotes, handles the money.
Cassidy: Yes.
Emily: Um, and the other one just kind of buries their head in the sand. I think that can lead to a lot of different issues. And maybe that's a whole other conversation we'll have on a different episode, but I think that's just something to be aware of.
Cassidy: That is definitely, definitely worth digging into deeper. I would honestly be interested in finding some statistics on that, because just reflecting in my own personal life, [00:21:00] I feel like so many couples that I know have either consciously or unconsciously defaulted to, like, one person handling everything for better or for worse, whether that person is capable of handling it or is not.
Emily: Mmhmm.
Cassidy: And even if they are capable, you need a hand in the finances.
Emily: Yeah.
Cassidy: Always. So, that's an excellent caveat. I'm very glad you brought that up.
Emily: Yeah. So, on that note, I did want to also make a couple suggestions for resources if this is something you are, like, ready to tackle with your partner. Because as we've said, what feels like a million times, like there are so many different ways to merge your finances and getting into the weeds of actually doing it can feel a little overwhelming.
So if you feel like you need a little more handholding or just, like, want to be exposed to other [00:22:00] approaches or like other dynamics there are a few suggestions I have for you. So one is an older, I don't remember when it was published, but an older book by David Bach. B A C H. and it's called Smart Couples Finish Rich.
This author has a bunch of books. He's a pretty prolific financial writer. And this book, I read it a while ago, so it's not super fresh, but I do remember that it was, like, a really good foundation. I think I read it, like, either just before or just after getting married. And we felt like it was super helpful in just getting, like, organized as far as like, those little details of what accounts need both of our names and this and that, and like keeping everything straight.
So that's a good resource, if not a little bit outdated, but I still think it's worth it.
And then we've mentioned him before on this show, I'm pretty sure a couple of times, but Ramit Sethi is a financial expert who [00:23:00] has a couple of books. He has a podcast and a Netflix show, and he actually focuses on the financial dynamics of relationships between married couples and his new book is called Money for Couples and goes into all of this in so much detail.
His podcast, I believe, is also called Money for Couples and then he has a Netflix show called I Will Teach You to Be Rich, or no, that's the name of his book, How to Get Rich. It's called How to Get Rich. And I believe it's also all revolving around couples. But he's a great resource. So definitely check those out.
Cassidy: We have also been toying with the idea of creating a workbook that walks you and your partner through the logistics of combining your finances. Like the step by step, the nitty gritty. But we didn't know if there would be demand for it, honestly, so if this sounds like something that you would want, let us know, and we may put it on our list of things to create for [00:24:00] this lovely community.
Emily: Yeah. Good reminder. So if you're ready to start this process with your partner, go ahead and set aside some time to talk through these steps and even better, maybe listen to the episode together or send them this episode so they can listen to it on their own. But hopefully that can help you both get on the same page.
Cassidy: Send it to ‘em!
