Money and Relationships: My Squeeze and Me

As my loyal readers will know, I moved in with my main squeeze two months ago. It has been just lovely, but it did bring up some new areas of discussion. We are not just roommates, but we are also not married and do not have legal rights to each other’s property. We aren’t ready for joint accounts yet, but we do have a lot of joint expenses. The bills at his/our place are a little higher than what I was paying before, but it is also a much better location and has a number of perks (like I get to live with my dreamy boyfriend).

Figuring out how we wanted to handle money together is not always easy, but we have had some good compromises and hopefully have figured out a system. It has been pretty pain free. (Ok, let’s be honest…it has been pain free for me because I love personal finance, but D does not love talking about money with me and I can see him squirming every time in bring up the subject with my excessive enthusiasm.)

So to give him a break from squirmily discussing our money, I will tell you all about the system we came up with:

-We set up a private googledocs spreadsheet (a la Lionel and Wilhemina) to track all of our mutual expenses. We put the receipts in a clip on the fridge and/or check our credit card statements, and fill in the spreadsheet each month. Whoever ends up having paid less writes a check to the other and then we start a fresh page of the spreadsheet.

-D is responsible for paying rent and utilities on time, because he lived here first so he already has the accounts set up in his name. We enter it in the spreadsheet and it goes into the overall expenses for the month.

-We pay the bills according to our take home pay. D makes a bit more than I do (but I negotiated my salary very successfully, I’m sure I’ll catch up soon!) so he pays a little more of the bills each month than I do.

We had a big discussion about whether we should divide the bills based on our take home pay or our pre-tax salary (aka, the number they tell you you are making when you get the job, not the amount you get on your actual paycheck). I contribute to my retirement accounts and my flexible spending healthcare account before I get my paycheck, but D is one of the lucky few who will get a pension when he retires, so he doesn’t contribute to a retirement account or a healthcare account.

I thought that I should be contributing based on our pre-tax amounts, because only I am benefiting from my healthcare account but (depending on our future together) either we both will benefit from my retirement savings, or just I will. D wanted to split bills based on our take home pay because he wanted to make sure I had enough to live on without feeling pinched.

It might seem a little ridiculous to be worried about this type of question because it doesn’t actually come down to very much money, but it it is important in our relationship that no one feels they are taken advantage of. This means that neither of us feels like we are paying more than we should, and neither of us feels like we always take out the trash.

Because we don’t know for sure where our futures will end up, it is hard to make decisions that deal with long term financial planning (like will D benefit from my retirement savings in 35 years? Hard to say.) It is difficult to be exactly fair with planning finances now, so we are doing the best we can and making sure we talk about it and we both agree.

-We have also started talking about long term savings goals together. We discussed the amount we are each putting aside (in separate savings accounts) for our savings goals, and we are in agreement on our savings priorities.

-I recently read that you should divide up tasks based on who is better at what in a relationship. In our case, that means I do most of the household shopping because I am a coupon rock star ($38 for $106 worth of home goods today, what what). He is an AMAZING planner, and he is great at taking advantage of Groupon deals and planning sweet dates and activities.

 

Our joint financial planning has just started, but I suspect it won’t be difficult to keep openly compromising. We created a system together, and if it doesn’t work, we will scrap it and create another system together. What is really important is communication, common goals, and that we care about each other more than we care about money. (Vomiting yet? Sorry not sorry!)