Enjoy this post by our friend Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez.
The week after I got engaged I opened my first shared bank account with my fiancé.
We had a wedding to save for and a shared savings account seemed like a good way for us to work toward that goal together.
Having all of your money flowing into one shared place can simplify everything from day to day expense management, like paying the rent, to planning for the future, like saving for a honeymoon.
But my fiancé and I were 32 years old when we got engaged. We’d already spent well over a decade earning, saving, spending and managing our own money.
I didn’t want to give up my fancy workout classes that my fiancé may have considered overpriced any more than he wanted to stop buying UFC pay per view fights that I had no interest in watching.
So while financial cooperation was important to us as we entered into this new life stage, so was our financial independence and autonomy.
Rather than trying to choose between two extremes – combining all of our finances or keeping our money totally separate, we decided to develop our own system for merging our money. One that didn’t dictate exactly how many bank accounts we could or couldn’t have, but rather, one that provided us with a framework to start managing our money as a team. A framework created around three central tenets…
- expectations
- rules
- and goals.
Setting Shared Financial Expectations
Our first step was to define our expectations. We started by opening a shared savings account and defining how much we expected one another to contribute.
We also defined our expectations around how the funds in the account would be used – in this case, to pay for our wedding and honeymoon expenses.
After that initial discussion, we started thinking about managing our money more broadly – not just in the context of saving up for our wedding, but also in the context of laying a financial foundation for the rest of our lives.
To better define our expectations we had to zoom out from the goal that was right in front of us (our wedding), and take a look at our full financial picture.
It was an opportunity for us to take a financial inventory of our own lives and share with one another.
How had each of us been saving (or not saving) for retirement? What new expectations did we need to create? Ex. We each commit to saving 20% of our annual income in tax advantaged retirement accounts.
We also had to assess our savings for other short-term goals and emergency savings – defining how and where we would save for each.
We also had to revisit our living expenses and talk about our expectations for managing our shared costs now that we were getting married.
We decided to open up a shared checking account and set the expectation that we’d each contribute $2,000 per month to the account to cover our household costs, leaving plenty of buffer room to cover miscellaneous expenses and transfer the overflow into savings if and when possible.
Setting expectations around each piece of our financial life helped us get on the same page financially, even if our money wasn’t all in the same accounts.
As long as we continue to meet the expectations we set together – like our respective retirement fund contributions, savings contributions and monthly checking account deposit, we’re free to spend the rest of our money however we like.
I can splurge on Classpass and barre workouts and he can pay for pay per view UFC fights without judgment or guilt. In other words by getting clear and specific around the expectations we have around our finances, it allows us to spend and save freely otherwise.
Setting Shared Money Rules
Our next step was to identify our money rules. Similar to financial expectations, financial rules are about getting on the same page with your partner about how you will or won’t manage your money.
For example, you might set a rule around debt. Maybe you and your partner agree that you will not open up a credit card or apply for any other line of credit without talking about it first.
Or maybe you come up with a dollar amount at which you and your partner agree that you will stop to check in with one another before buying something (even if the money is coming from your individual accounts).
One essential rule is deciding how frequently you’ll review and discuss your money plan. I like setting aside a fixed time every month to go over what’s working and what isn’t, to see how and where we can make adjustments ins our financial plans.
These ‘money dates’ give us an opportunity to talk about where we both stand financially, what we both want to achieve financially, and what steps we’re both taking, both individually and as a team, to make those things happen. It also gives us the chance to address unexpected expenses or circumstances – adjusting our plan as needed.
We realize that our goals will inevitably change over time and that we’ll need to continually re-prioritize and readjust our financial plans together to stay on the same page. So our money talks are as regular a relationship practice as anything else.
Setting Our Money Goals
Setting money goals is the third critical ingredient of our shared financial framework.
Once we committed to being our relationship for the long haul we needed to make sure we were managing our money for the long-term as well. In other words, we had to address more than the day-to-day financial questions like who pays for what, and start mapping out our goals for the next five, ten, twenty plus years.
So we started sharing all our financial priorities with each other – from financing epic travel to being covering basic emergency savings needs.
We talked about what existing plans and savings we already had in place to achieve those goals and what steps we were still taking. Once we identified the top goals we each wanted to achieve, we created rules and expectations around what we needed to do financially to support those goals, so we could commit to achieving them together.
By using goals, rules and expectations as the foundation for our shared financial strategy, we’ve been able to avoid common money conflicts – like judging one another for our financial choices or telling each other what we can and can’t spend money on.
Instead of saying something to the effect of, ‘you spend too much money on video games,’ I can say something like ‘I think we need to save more money each week if we still want to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon. Can we talk about how we can do that?’
By steering the conversation back to our shared plan and goals (rather than his choices or my behaviors), we’re able to side step situations that lead to a communication breakdown. Maintaining our financial independence and autonomy while staying committed to our newly shared future.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that our system of managing money together is totally perfect and that it will continue to work exactly as it does right now for the rest of our lives.
I expect my partner and I will disagree at times and get discouraged and struggle to find compromise in our financial life, much like we do in the other facets of our life. I expect that circumstances like job loss or illness will force us to adjust our shared rules, expectations and goals.
But by maintaining the practice of a regular money dialogue and grounding whatever financial strategy we use in the framework of expectations, rules and goals, I’m confident that we’ll continue to be able to manage our money as a team, even if we use our own unique system for doing it.
Stefanie O’Connell Rodriguez is a nationally recognized millennial money expert and author of the book, “The Broke and Beautiful Life.” She is also the founder of Statement Cards, a greeting card company that celebrates financial wins — from getting a raise to paying off your student loans.
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