I budget over a month and I can never for the life of me remember that my fiance stopped by the grocery store and spent $23 two weeks ago. We don’t have a problem with the communicating, we actually talk about most things before we buy them, just like you. It’s the remembering I have trouble with.

When it’s not joint, I can see a problem in that you never have to communicate if you wish. It’s yours and mine money.

Children would most likely be treated the same as joint expenses. For us, that means splitting expenses evenly, although there are other methods.

My point was that every time you spend money independently of your spouse (excluding spending money), you have to tell them about it so that everyone is on the same page with the budget. Otherwise, you go buy a new pillow and they go buy a new lamp and you’ve blown your budget. I suppose if you never shopped separately, always used cash, or never made unplanned purchases it wouldn’t be a problem.

We do make separate purchases, rarely use cash, and sometimes desperately need new socks or a new pillow. If I were to create a joint budget out of my personal budget, off the top of my head, I would have categories for clothing, health care, eating out, gas, personal (hair care, deodorant, etc.), house (light bulbs, pillows, lamps) and then my spending money and groceries. Each of those categories needs to be kept track of. It just seems too easy to forget that the other person already spent that money.

As for budgeting when joint, how many expenses really need to be spent separately?

Spending money? Shouldn’t everything else be joint? Mortgage, utilities, car loan, student loans, debt in general.

Then you have eating out, etc. Well if you have say $300 cash you can divvy it up in cash. Or like my DH and I, we get $40/month cash for lunch and everything else is joint.

Groceries should be joint right? How many people shop more than once a week? Gas for the car? Well can you really fill up more than necessary?

Separate finances doesn’t work unless each person has at least one income stream. That is a con to the system. If ever there was only one income, you’d have to change how you operate. Each system has its pros and cons. With joint finances, it’s harder to follow a budget. That’s simply because it’s harder to track how much of a budget category has been spent when multiple people are doing the spending. That’s a con for joint systems.

Other general thoughts:

The way I see it, joint and separate finances are just a framework. It’s the basics of how the money flows. After that, you still have to figure out all the details. How do you decide how much to save? You can save a set amount, by percentage, or by goal (or anything else). The decision isn’t contingent on joint or separate finances. They all work either way, it just depends on what you choose to do. Agree? Disagree?

So how do you manage your bottom line? Well, how do you do it jointly and why can’t you do it the same way separately?

Personally, we worry less about bottom lines, and more about getting to where we want to be. We talk about our goals and dreams and what we want to do in our lives and we fit it all together, forming a general plan. Aside from the constraints of income and living expenses, our individual budgets work around that more important plan. It works for us, because we put us and the important stuff before me and the ‘I want’ stuff. It would also work just as well if we managed jointly.

When the rules change, you reevaluate, make a new plan and go on. We prefer to stick with separate finances, but neither one of us is going to leave the other high and dry like Stacey’s parents (which I think is horrible btw).