In (budgetary) sickness and in health: building a financially equal relationship
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Trent Hamm Guest blogger
When people get married or become fully committed enough to combine their finances, they often take the right step by merging their financial situations together.
What they miss out on, though, is establishing true financial equality within the relationship. There is still a sense of 鈥渕ine鈥� and 鈥測ours.鈥� You have 鈥測our鈥� debts, I have 鈥渕y鈥� bigger income.
Very few people enter into a financial relationship with the exact same amount of money and the exact same amount of income and the same debt level, so such inequalities seem natural. The problem is that these inequalities are pernicious and can end up damaging the relationship over the long run.
Your best plan is to stop this before it starts and establish a financially equal relationship right off the bat.
How do you do that if incomes are unequal?
The first thing you do is make it clear that聽all income is 鈥渙ur鈥� income and all debts are 鈥渙ur鈥� debts.聽When you commit to someone, you don鈥檛 commit to being a lesser or greater part of the relationship.聽
When you鈥檙e sharing everything, debts affect both of you, as does income. Treating debts as 鈥渉is鈥� debts and 鈥渉er鈥� debts hurts both of you. They are collectively 鈥測our鈥� debts.
The same is true for income. It goes into the same pool and you draw from it collectively to fit your needs and desires. For individual spending, you should be drawing roughly equal amounts from that pool.
If one of you deals with longer hours or more professional stress, deal with that separately from the finances. Talk about it and come up with a plan to share other tasks in a way so that you maximize the energy and time you have to spend together.
This all revolves around trust, but every successful relationship is built on trust.聽If you cannot trust each other enough to take steps to ensure this kind of financial equality, then you don鈥檛 trust each other enough to maintain a long-term committed relationship.
These measures are prevention against issues of inequality cropping up later on in a relationship. If you don鈥檛 guard against it from the start, a sense of inequality will grow and the roots will dig into your relationship, opening up cracks and eventually tearing it apart. Don鈥檛 let that happen.
This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available聽at Amazon聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽
