Combining finances with a spouse can be complicated. You may earn different incomes, have different saving priorities and different tolerance for investment risk.
Some expenses, such as for food or shelter, seem like no-brainer joint purchases. Others, such as gifts for one another, might work better if you have separate accounts.
That doesn't even get into the technical aspects of merging money. Sign up as an authorized user on a spouse's credit card, for instance, and that card's previous history will show up on your credit report. Open a credit card jointly, and you're each responsible for the full balance, whether you and your spouse have different spending habits or not.
There's no one model that's right for every couple. Still, financial planners generally recommend some version of Yours, Mine, and Ours: a mixture of joint accounts to handle expenses you want to split and separate accounts for individual spending.
That's why a recent tweet from Ian Weiner, a certified financial planner and owner of Bespoke Wealth Solutions, stands out. In response to another user who said, "Don't marry someone you wouldn't share a credit card with," Weiner posted, "My wife and I have almost entirely separate finances, AMA."
AMA stands for "ask me anything," so that's what we did.
CNBC Make It caught up with Weiner to ask about how he and his wife, Jes — a muralist based in Bentonville, Arkansas — divvy things up. Here's what he said.
CNBC Make It: You seem to be bucking the trend a little bit by keeping everything separate. How did you get here?
Really just accidentally. It kind of just works for us, because we think fairly differently.
We have a lot of overlap on how we want to raise the kids and what's important and that kind of thing. But on the other hand, she's a muralist, and an artist, and she's getting ready to be a tattoo artist, and I'm a financial planner.
It really helps us to have less conflict. She likes to gift a lot. She's a great gift-giver. And that's not something that is as important to me.
So if we had the same operating account for those types of things, I think we would disagree a lot more about some of the discretionary expenses, that's for sure.
How do you handle things, such as housing costs, that married couples often tend to split?
Those tend to get handled by me. And it's sort of just born out of the way that we've done things over the years.
We've got three kids. My oldest just turned 10. For a long time, my wife primarily worked at the house and raising the kids. My income covered that stuff. And as we've grown, as she's grown her art business, it's sort of stayed that way.
But things that we add — both my boys are in flag football right now, or when they do soccer, that kind of stuff — she tends to take on those sorts of additional or more fun things that are kind of related to the kids or trips or those kinds of things. I just kind of maintain the fixed expenses.
I can't say that it's exactly planned that way, but it is just sort of the way that it's worked out, and we just kind of let it go.
Critics might say, "This is a partnership. You should be splitting things evenly or proportionately." What do you say to that?
There are really two levels of that argument. There's a moral portion of the argument that some people make, which is, "You guys share everything. You should you should share finances." And really what they mean is, "You should share discretion over the spending." That's really what the approach is.
Then there's the logistical argument, which is, that everything should be split 50/50 so you both essentially have fair use of it.
I just don't know that we even think too much that way. We sort of see ourselves as a team. The workload is not always even. Sometimes when she's traveling, I'm taking care of the kids the whole week. Sometimes I'm traveling.
We want to be different than trying to do this kind of, "Well, you didn't load the dishwasher, and I did." We don't want to try to keep score, and we truly do see each other as 100% equal co-partners.
People online seemed to think your model showed a lack of trust.
It's actually the opposite. We trust each other so much that we don't feel the need to be combing through the transactions, and we don't value each other just for the income that's brought in.
How do communicate around who spends what? What happens when the washing machine breaks and you need to replace it?
In both of our worlds, the bulk of our income is fairly irregular. Mine is a little bit more regular than hers. The way that we do it is, I have a spreadsheet that tracks cash flow.
So, for instance, we have an anniversary trip coming up. We're not going to go crazy, but we'll spend $1,500 or $2,000 on the trip. Deciding where that money is going to come from is just an asset allocation issue.
I'll pull up the spreadsheet, and I'll look at her next 60 to 90 days of expected income, and I'll look at mine. And we'll go, "Hey, we've got to do X, Y and Z, where should we pull the money from?" And we'll sort of talk through that.
So conceptually, we view everything together. We don't feel that it's separate. But we end up managing it separately.
What about saving for retirement? Do you invest as a team, or separately?
She and I think of long-term stuff very, very differently. By nature, I'm very long-term focused, almost to a fault. I would much rather prepare for the future than enjoy stuff today. That's just my nature.
She is very much the opposite. She doesn't disregard the future, but I think she would say that, that's not that's not guaranteed, that's not promised. She's focused on making memories, especially with raising the kids.
We don't want to try to keep score, and we truly do see each other as 100% equal co-partners.Ian Weinerowner, Bespoke Wealth Solutions
What's is important to her is building strong relationships now and as long as possible. And if she's going to invest money, she wants to invest in experiences and making memories.
That's just another way that we kind of counterbalance each other. Generally, what ends up happening is, for more of the long-term, tax advantaged or retirement savings, I handle that on my side. And then for things like trips -- we took a trip to Virginia to see her grandparents. Most of that she saved for and paid for.
Are there couples for whom you'd advise against this type of model? One where one person tends to overspend and get into debt comes to mind.
I think in our case, some of it is, the plumber sometimes has a leaky faucet. I'm so focused on serving my clients that sometimes my own situation gets a little bit overlooked. I'm recognizing that we needed a tiny bit more structure than we have, and we're slowly building that.
If I was working with a couple who kind of liked the idea, but some of those things were present, what we would really want is to build systems. We want to eliminate as much emotional influence in this cash flow planning as possible.
What I mean by that is, typically, if someone has a spending problem, or a credit card problem, it's more behavioral than anything else. To address that we want to build systems that don't suffocate, but that also don't feed that potential fire.
So, if those things are present, we want to put in guardrails for those types of things. Maybe an example would be, we have fairly predictable fixed expenses for that couple. We know the mortgage, we know the insurance, and we can create a joint operating account for those bills come out of. You have X percentage from Partner A and Y percentage from Partner B go into that on a regular basis to eliminate having the big conversations about it. And keep a couple of things separate.
The other area where I would say it probably doesn't make sense is, you have to have a pretty high degree of trust in general with your partner for this to make sense. If there's not a ton of comfort there emotionally, [keeping finances separate] probably doesn't make sense.
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