How Did You Decide Whether to Merge Finances With Your Partner?
This post may contain affiliate links and Corporette® may earn commissions for purchases made through links in this post. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

If you're married or in a long term relationship, have you merged finances? What factors made you decide whether to share financial accounts or keep separate accounts?
We haven't talked about this too long, and The New York Times just had an interesting story noting that although most people think sharing a financial account will lead to increased conflict, a recent study found that was the opposite.
We haven't talked about this in way too long, so I thought it might make an interesting discussion here.
What Research Shows about Sharing Accounts with Your Spouse
As The New York Times (gift link) recently noted,
Although nearly one in three people in a 2024 survey by WalletHub believed that sharing a financial account led to increased conflict, research finds the opposite is true. A recent study published in The Journal of Consumer Research found that couples with joint accounts tended to be happier and more committed than those without. Merging finances helps align a couple’s financial goals and encourages them to create a tighter bond as they work together on saving for a house or retirement, the research showed.
Interesting! One of the couples quoted in the article explained further: “I feel like it’s a lot easier to hit your financial goals when you’re all working in the same direction and you both have all of the information.”
Different Ways to Split Expenses
There are a number of different methods that I've heard about through the years, and I'm curious to hear from you guys (particularly those of you who are the breadwinners): what is your family's method for sharing money? There was a great series in Slate many years ago (now available as a Kindle book) that defined these main types:
- Common Potters – people who combine all of their money
- Sometime Sharers – people who have both separate and joint accounts (usually with an automatic percentage going into the joint account)
- Independent Operators – people who have completely separate accounts
How My Husband and I Share Finances
As I've mentioned before, I never wanted to feel like I was “chasing” my husband for “his share” of the bills, so when we first got married we tried to be Sometime Sharers (with 80% of each person's income going to a joint account based on some old Suze Orman advice), but it got complicated quickly:
…if I bought him a sweater, was that our money? Or my money? (What if it was a really, really good sale that I totally couldn't pass up?) If he went out for drinks with our best man (who is my husband's friend, but is now like family to both of us) and bought him a round or two of drinks, was that his money? Or our money? It felt like the questions were never ending.
After a few months of marriage we decided to just keep all of the money in a joint account (Common Potters), and we haven't looked back since. (It probably helps matters here that I am both the primary spender in the family, as well as the person who manages our finances.) That said, I do still have separate investment accounts that I opened before we got married […] but all new investments have gone to jointly held accounts.
We are still Common Potters, and I have no regrets — but I recognize that there are LOTS of ways to do this! I think things got a bit complicated for some friends after kids came along — people who had been Independent Operators became Sometime Sharers or Common Potters in order to pay for childcare, as well as “family” type things like vacations.
(For what it's worth I did keep an investment account that I had before we got married that is separate from our joint finances, although I haven't really added to it since we've been married. Also, obviously, our retirement accounts are separate.)
The Pros to Merging Finances with Your Husband
I tend to agree with the woman quoted in the article — having shared finances means all of our money is going to shared financial goals.
Another benefit: if one partner is savvier with money than the other, the second partner doesn't have to worry about money issues quite so much. In my marriage this tends to be me, so I'm the one in charge of saving, investing, and so forth.
I do think it's important to note that everything should be very transparent to both partners. Over the years, I've given my husband a “state of the union” where I'd basically go over how much we had in each account, or how much we'd saved toward a specific goal. And he of course has full access to all of the accounts.
Readers, how about you — have you merged finances? What factors made you decide whether to share financial accounts or keep separate accounts?
{related: who manages the money in your house?}
Stock photo via Deposit Photos / AndrewLozovyi.
we were fairly young when we moved in, got engaged and got married (25/26) and were both in grad school early in our marriage. honestly we never really discussed not having combined finances. both sets of our parents do that when we got married it never occurred to either of us that there was any other way…it’s now been 13+ years since we got married and this works well for us. i have inherited a decent amount of money, but some of it is in retirement accounts, so that is still in my name. when my father dies i will also inherit more, but we’ll cross that bridge then.
Correlation does not equal causation.
I almost called off my wedding because he was being such a jerk to me in the weeks leading up to it. He knocked it off when I started pulling together stuff to call it off. Two months into our marriage, I was shattered, broken, and in tears, asked if he wanted a divorce. Add in tremendous social pressure (that I ignored) to quit my job, and trust me, those finances were kept separate.
We are divorcing now and I don’t think joint finances would have saved our marriage. It reverses what caused what.
This isn’t a chicken-or-the-egg problem. It may not be something you can run a study and prove, but I think it’s self-evident that the stability and commitment of a relationship makes people more likely to share finances, not that shared finances improve the stability of a relationship.
Congrats on your divorce!
When my husband and I got engaged, he had just sold his business, and I never wanted him or others to think that this was the reason why I was with him. So I always made clear to him that his buyout money was his separate property and that my inheritance (much smaller amount) was my separate property. We have a joint account but I have my own checking account and my paychecks only go into that account. Both accounts are used for community expenses, but I still like having my own checking account because psychologically, it makes me feel like I have control over my finances. It’s worked well this way for the past 26 years.
It seems like separate finances only works well if the spouses have close to the same income. Otherwise, they will have different lifestyles, and I can’t imagine building a strong partnership on that foundation. That would get especially hard to navigate after kids when it’s common for one spouse to dial back at work to spend more time at home. I did that – continued to work full time, but did not pursue significantly higher paying opportunities that would’ve been more demanding. I struggled with some resentment over that as it was, and I can’t imagine how I would’ve felt if my husband was not only building an unfettered career but also living larger.
I kept a separate account for the first year of being married. After that, we combined accounts. We each still have a separate credit card in our own name, rarely used. We have a philosophy that it is our money to work with and grow as a partnership. This serves us well as we have taken turns as a breadwinner, each while the other went to graduate school. So having a single pot of money really reinforced the partnership aspect of working to build a life together.
My husband has ADHD that was undiagnosed/untreated for about 12 years of our relationship. Sharing financial accounts was a TERRIBLE idea for us & our marriage. Constant struggle, constant fighting.
I’m primary breadwinner but that’s because our society’s priorities are wrong and advertising execs are more highly paid than research scientists. We work equally hard and are both doing so towards our shared future. therefore we each max our 401ks first and then just direct deposit all the money in one account, buy whatever we need, and have all the bills on auto-pay. If it’s a big purchase we discuss it, but otherwise, we both assume we are being equally responsible because we are equally emotionally and financially invested in our life together, and therefore it makes sense to share our earnings equally as well.