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My wife and I just got married, but we have been together for six years. We have been open about our finances from the first few months that we dated, because we wanted the best for each other in all aspects of life.
Even when we were working minimum wage jobs in college, we swapped our notes about our favorite happy hours where we could save a few bucks by ordering a plate of appetizers to share, our rationale for choosing our first credit card, and what our big savings goals were for.
Once we started our full time jobs, we talked about our goals to contribute to our Roth IRAs and 401(k)s and how we could make the most of our company's matching policies.
Our openness about finances is something that we've continued to have in our relationship as a recently married couple. My wife and I also know that we don't have to have kids, which frees us up to use our finances to spend for our individual and collective futures.
That means we're able to work toward our financial goals of finding our forever home, paying off any student loan debt, and allocating funds for things we love, like vacations and dinners at our favorite restaurants.
As a queer couple, the idea of approaching our finances in gendered ways didn't make sense to us, so we focused on defining "fairness" on our terms. Before deciding what to do, we talked openly about each of our finances, specifically our assets, debts, and balances of our retirement accounts.
By having a clear picture of each other's financial assets, we were able to make informed decisions about what made sense for us as a couple.
We realized that fairness didn't have to be a 50/50 split down the middle on our bills and expenses — instead, it just has to feel fair to us. My wife and I are pretty similar in our base salaries, so we used these numbers as our baseline.
My wife takes call shifts at the hospital, which can vary greatly, as can the bonuses or stock awards that I get from work. My wife and I ultimately decided that splitting our mortgage payments in proportion to our income would be fair. By splitting it relative to our income, we can contribute to shared equity without either of us feeling financially burdened.
We also usually trade off when it comes to paying for dinners and events unless it's a special occasion where we really want to treat the other person. And for bigger investments, we'll either split them or one of us will buy an item if it's something we want individually.
Although we are a couple, we keep some aspects of our finances separate. We save for retirement individually, and we each have emergency funds that make sense for how much we earn. Our separate assets were codified in the prenup we drafted before we got married, and I paid for my wife's legal fees to ensure that it wouldn't be a financial burden for her and that she knew her rights.
I also treat my freelance writing business as my own entity since I run it completely by myself, and my wife pays for her car and auto insurance on her own since she's the owner of it and I don't drive; however, I usually pay for gas since my partner and I use the car to run errands and take road trips.
We also allocate our own budgets to buy birthday and holiday presents for each other, and my wife even recently paid for a trip to Disneyland, an homage to the theme park trips we took at the beginning of our relationship.
Now that we're married, we're finding new ways to have togetherness in our finances by getting a joint credit card that we can use for bills we share like utilities, trips, groceries, and our ever-growing collection of thrifted baskets and funky furniture from Urban Outfitters. We're looking for a credit card that has benefits we can use together, whether it's airline miles or hotel points. In the process, we're building a financial future while maintaining our autonomy.
