YNAB & privacy

Before I got married, I heard lots of advice about how to handle money in marriage, such as “have separate bank accounts” and “only use one joint bank account” and “as long as bills are covered, you should buy whatever you want” and “every penny must be accounted for to make sure nothing funny is happening”.

Back when we were Dual Income No Kids, I just sent her my half of the bills (as I had moved in with her and they were all in her name). It was easy and simple. Once we had our first kid and she quit her job, there was a question of how to handle spending money. I switched my direct deposit to give me an allowance (personal bills, etc) and then send the rest to her with the comment that she could spend as much as she wanted, that I both trusted her and thought she deserved to buy whatever she wanted.

This seemed fine but after two years, she admitted that she didn’t feel free to do whatever, that because her money was muddled in with the bills money, it felt bad to spend it on herself (even tho she knew I was okay with it).

I came up with a solution I haven’t seen anyone ever describe (tho there’s no way I’m the first to come up with it): she opened a second private account, and I set up my DD to send both of us the same allowance, and then send whatever is left over to our joint account. Aka, treat my job as a business and us as the two employees.

This has worked incredibly well. We both “earn” the same amount of money for our jobs (mine as an employed software dev, her as a stay at home mom), we both have privacy for our personal spending, and as long as we don’t go wild with our family spending (restaurants, shit for the kids), we save money.

I recommend it to everyone who wants to treat joint money a little more equitably.

it turns out once you have disparate income levels it actually really helps emotionally to work out some sort of joint finances. if you think about your money as belonging to the family, it's easier to not worry about fairness and instead think about your shared goals

personally, we use ynab and each have separate discretionary money that is for no questions asked spending. we haven't worried about privacy too much but ive told my wife she's welcome to have an unlinked account and fill it from discretionary if she wants

we have separate bank accounts but that's mostly because i think she should have enough of our shared finances (roughly half) in her own name that she never feels trapped in the relationship