Who takes care of the finances in your household?

And why?

We do. I earn it, she spends it.

Same

Simple breakdown is I pay the mortgage and she pays for everything else.

Because she pays for my boat!!

I do investments, she does the cash flow

I make it she spends it . I don’t even know how to go about paying half of our bills

This right here...same at our household

We have separate accounts, she pays her bills and I pay mine. No arguments and no asking permission to make a purchase.

I work, she takes care of the finances. been working for 28 years.

We keep 3 accounts, mine, hers and ours. She is self employed for 42 years now (main reason for "hers"), while I'm still working for Corp America.
All household related expenses comes out of "ours", including vacations etc. We both pay into "Ours" first, then pay ourselves in our individual accounts.
It may seem weird to some, but has worked flawlessly for the 20 years we've been together.

The wife, she has more time & she can hide the money she spends

I make the money. She handles the day to day things, makes sure the bills are paid on time and groceries are bought. When we first started dating, she had her checkbook balanced and was cheap about everything she did. That's when I decided she would handle the bills if we ever got married.

As far as I know, I get to do whatever I want and we're not broke so it seems to be working as planned.

I make all long term investment decisions about retirement and also handle the home/vehicle purchases.

I have my own bank account for play money.

Anything large is a joint decision. She pays the bills and I make sure there is enough in the account to pay for it.
We both participate and are both aware of what is what and where it is.

She handled the checking and savings account.

I handle my business stuff and our 401k.

Same, she was in the financial biz before we started a family and she chose to quit and focus on motherhood. I’m just not very good at finances

This is essentially our set up. My wife takes care of the day to day bill paying etc... I handle the investments and longer term money plays.

Me, Myself, and I .

Her. She makes at least two times what I do and she has a substantially larger net worth and has had since before we got together. .
I do pay her 'rent' to cover car payment and bills and I take care of my credit cards.

A simple lesson I learned a long time ago. If you have a wife that spends money on luxury items. Let her pay the bills for a year.

The only stipulation if all credit cards have to be paid off each month.

If the Wife wants the marriage to survive she will reduce her purchases.

There are so many unseen bills, property, auto insurance property taxes, I think a lot of people think they are doing a whole lot better financially than they really are.

I moved to her house so all the bills are in her name. I write a check for half the household. I have my CCs which are paid off every month and she has hers that she pays minimum.. I have my investments, she has her investments.

But, she's retired and I ain't.

She pays the bills, does our taxes, and all the online banking and finance stuff. I’ve got the spending side down.

We have one account. I never really understood the need for three separate accounts: his, hers, and ours.

Jimmy

She pays all the bills. I really wouldn't know where to start and don't want to know.

She does.

She handles the bills, kids, house and makes more money.

I'm honestly not sure how/why I still have a place to live.

Wife and I have our own retirements and we split the normal bills. If an unexpected expense pops up we talk about it! Yearly vacation trips when we take one are usually split. Tax refund is split 50/50 although I have more withheld! Go figure....

Mine makes double what I do so do as she says.

She hates the responsibility and I'm a numbers guy so it doesn't bother me.

I have my bills and she has her bills. We split them proportionally to our after tax earnings.

How much is that?

She obviously likes guys that have Chinese tattoos and love TikTok, and cook lunch in a truck crockpot. I think she’s making out like a bandit.

She pays the bills, I pay for sex.

This. The smart one handles all money in our household. I ain't the smart one.

Same here...If it gets hosed all I can blame is myself lol..

Same here. I pay mortgage. She does utilities and child care. Works out fine. I buy what I want and she does the same. No shared account

Joint account. She handles bill paying, taxes, etc. She uses the same system though that I used before we were married. Honestly, with direct deposit, I assume that my wife will tell me I got fired before my job does. I just go to work every day.

Edit: When we first got married, we tried both working on this and it was painful. It's not worth the argument to have control over this area.

She manages finances, but we are each responsible for making sure bills get paid. If I called to how cable and Internet installed, then I make sure that Bill gets paid each month. If she wanted to get Terminex to come out each quarter, she makes sure those bills get paid.

We have a combined checking account, and a combined savings account. Then, we each have separate accounts that an equal amount of money goes into each month. We can use it however we like. If I want to save up for a new fish finder or something, I pay for it out of that, for example.

But she manages the accounts monthly, like to move some into savings. I have access to all of it and she will tell me what’s going on after she pays some bills each month and balances everything out. I can do it, I just don’t like to. It’s worked out well for us.

Unless I want us to be living in a refrigerator box under the over pass, I do it all.

Ditto, couldn’t tell you if we have $100 in our checking or $10,000.

We both know the drill for bill paying and finances and share the duty to me that is how it should be. Too many times something happens to one spouse or the other and the surviving spouse has no clue how to deal with finances.

I do. Why? Because I like when the light comes on when I flip the switch and when the water goes down the hole when I flush the terlet.

We both do.

I'm considering the idea of firing my wife from paying the bills. Not sure that will go over well. She started working again a few months ago for the first time in 8 years. Since then I've been on the phone a half dozen times asking various credit card companies to waive late fees. Money isn't our problem, her remembering to pay the bills seems to be the issue. To be fair to her she did a pretty solid job until she started this new job and got wicked busy. I have OT time, so I probably have time to do the bills. Also to be fair to her we have complicated finances. My strategy while she wasn't working was to have her pay the bills so she felt involved and had a better sense of the magnitude of the cash flows each direction.

Kind of the same here. She transfers me XXXX dollars a month and I take care of all the bills.

I end paying more but I also make more. The ratio between what I pay and what she pays compared to our individual salaries is on the spot. Seemed like the most equitable way to do it and so far has worked. Never had a disagreement about money doing it this way...

Both of us, but she pays the day to day bills.

I work she takes care of the bills, 34 years and counting.

Our Butler.

Both work. She pays the bills. Most everything is auto pay anyway. I keep at set amount in my separate account every payday. Put any extra money in there too. Works great. Credit score always 800+.

Now in the first two marriages this method would have been a disaster.

I did for years, but these days she pays the personal bills and handles all finances on our C Corp.

Both own businesses, both have our own bank accounts and pay our bills we have divided up, and then go halfsies a lot on other stuff.. Works for us, I don’t criticize her Amazon purchases and she doesn’t criticize all my man toys because we each do our own thing,,

I did with the exception of a short time when I handed off to the ex. That was a mistake. When she filed for divorce she was all giddy because she had no idea we did not have an escrow. She tried to take the house until I convinced her attorney that while she might afford the mortgage she could not afford the taxes and insurance. She got mad and asked "why don't we have an escrow everybody else does?". I reminded her that she signed the paperwork and was present at closing.

We’re 55 and have had a joint account since we were 19, also work together at our business she and our daughter are CPA’s wife runs our office both home and business. We are in the same page at every turn.......I think

We do. We keep things separate.

I would have guessed it was the maid spending your money but no judgements.

My wife said a while back, how come I can’t pay the bills. I said, never in my life been late on a house payment. We have 800 plus credit score, I think at one time it was 850 ish. I had lender when we built this last house say I may have the highest credit score he’d seen. I asked my wife if she thought she could have done better. She didn’t have much of an answer.

I asked her what she would do different with our investments. She said she really didn’t understand that stuff works. I said pretty sure I got the bills covered and this money stuff covered.

Who?

Billy, to have a score thst high ypu had alot of debt i would think. Not saying I'm right, just thinking out loud

Our “Butler” is our bank. We have everything setup on auto draft. Haven’t been late on anything in over 25 years. It’s nice to not worry about the day to day and month to month stuff. We send a set amount to savings each month, then rest we blow on whatever.

Maybe not the best way, but it works.

Why not setup auto pay and then check once a month to make sure there isn’t a problem with one of them? Then you’ll never miss a payment, and also won’t have something crazy happen, like a credit card linked to a bill expiring, or the biller dropping some massive fee on you, etc.

Not exactly how that works.

Not Brad

Group effort. Wife pays the day to day bills, but I tend to have a more big picture approach and she handles the details.

My wife is a finance manager, she makes more than I do. She bought my boat. She controls our money. I have no issues with our arrangement. I dig through her clothes for spare cash when I do her laundry so I can fill up the boat. This is normal, right?

She does, we spent the first 35 years of marriage with me being gone chasing the oilfield all over the world. It was by necessity that she did it, When I retired, I could see no reason to mess with a system that works. If I want something I simply ask her "can we afford this car/truck/boat/gun/etc" and so far she's always told me to go for it. Ain't knocking success.

Me too.

I don’t understand why more people don’t do this.

I get ONE bill a month that I can’t set up on auto draft and I always have a several hundred credit balance, that I fund a few times a year, in that account, so I don’t have to worry about it

I guess we are old school we have a couple that have to be auto draft but for everything else just pay thru BOA online banking and avoid auto draft. Not that many anyway since everything is paid for. We do charge everything we can and pay off each month to get the free points.

It doesn’t work that way. It means you have very good record of pay with a really low debt to income ratio.

Bingo, I keep her under control by the way I disperse it., I consider the money I put it in the checking account she uses gone the minute it goes in there. I keep another checking account that she has to ask me for. Big purchases. I disperse money for investments directly to broker so she has no clue on that other than when she sees a statement I leave laying around. I keep alot of cash in bussines account where she cant touch it and I trickle it in as needed. My wife can spend with the best if them........ all personal bills are on autodraft because paying them would interfere with her shopping time.

The strategy up to this point has been to keep the checking account low, so we feel broke. Basically income gets direct deposited into a single checking account, then gets auto transferred to about 15 other accounts. "Mortgage fund, vacation fund, auto fund, kids college fund, savings, investments, emergency savings, home repair, taxes, etc..." Those accounts always have what they need and you never have to worry about them running low. The main checking account however, it can run dangerously low some times. Hence the artificial feeling of being broke. If we set up autodrafts on the credit cards out of that account we absolutely would over draft sometimes. It's worked okayish over the years, but requires significant manual intervention. I wanted to hear how other folks do it, hence this thread. It may be time for a change. I'm going to give the full autodraft thing some thought.

This ^^^^^

That's really complicating something that's not that hard...

I'd revisit this plan... KISS

We both do. A lot of them are auto-drafted. We're on the same checking account, savings account, mortgage, vehicles, all of it. Both of us.

My wife works and takes care of the finances. I'm retired and I take care of the cooking, cleaning, and fishing. I'm a spoiled old man!!

Me, Myself and I

Wife does ours, she’s an accountant. Lol

Only monthly bills we have are electric, water, and trash ($200-$300 a month). She pays them and her personal phone and pays the auto insurance once every six months, I pay the property taxes and property insurance for all our properties once a year.

I’ve never had my own cell phone, been on a company phone since the 90’s. Other than income taxes, we don’t owe anyone anything, no satellite or cable TV, no credit cards, no car payments and no mortgage on any property.

Haven't had a loan in a decade, pretty sure my credit score is Zero, and I'm loving it.

Anything large is a joint decision. I pays the bills and manage the 401K's and other investments. She has full access to all of it and is very frugal on everything except Christmas for the kids and grandkids. We both worked till retirement and have always had a joint account with no problems for over 30 years.
She is aware of what is what and where it is, as our oldest son.

I understand the reasoning, but I agree with Dan. Seems over complicated.

I handle the finances for better or worse but there has to be a mutual agreement for large purchases.

All of our bills are in a spreadsheet that gets updated daily.

Ditto!!!!!!

65-35

I keep the books, she pays the bills . We both have our part, we both know where we are at.

all goes into the same pot. Major purchase are discussed before hand.

She does mainly. She does all the expense tracking and most of the budget since we decided to get completely debt-free a few years ago. She is a wizard with Excel so she enjoys all of that.

We make all big expense decisions together - Cars, A/C, House Projects, etc. I do the research and/or work and she handles the money.

All income dumps into the same accounts. Nothing separate except our emergency credit cards, but all purchases are recorded in our budget. It allows us to hold each other accountable if we start to slip. Never understood the whole separate accounts deal... but I am still young.

She draws a pretty nifty retirement and I make a decent income. She pays the cell phone bill, car insurance and buys grceries. I pay all the utilities and both our homes are paid for as well as our vehicles. She has her money and I have mine occasionally around Christmas for a little extra.