How do you handle finances with someone you’re seeing regularly (maybe even living together) and dining at home together frequently ?
How do you handle cost of food? Split groceries 50/50? What if your partner eats way more?
Eating out is easy to split, and if there’s food only one person eats is also easy. But what about eating at home where you share the foods?
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My partner and I counted groceries as one of the bills when we split up bills. I pay for all groceries, as I do almost all of the cooking and I am far more organized. My partner takes care of another bill to balance it out.
We used to charge groceries and other shared expenses on one of our credit cards. He’d give me his half of the bill every month. We’re now married and have a joint account, but this worked for us before. You’re not constantly paying one another back, just once a month.
My spouse makes a lot more money than me so typically they’ll handle the pricier meals and I’ll get cheaper ones. It balances out pretty proportionally.
We just made it simple. She pays for all of the groceries and dining out that we do.
My fiancé bought our house before we were engaged, I didn’t contribute financially and it’s in his name only. So he pays the mortgage and household bills. If we were to split, I leave and he stays/keeps the house.
I buy all the groceries (and other household goods like toilet paper, shampoo, stuff like that) as one of my contributions. I also pay for small maintenance projects like painting, HVAC repairs, chimney inspections, so on. And I do 98% of all cooking, cleaning, laundry.
Dollar wise he spends more per month but with the amount I spend on groceries ($500-$600 a month) plus the labor of running the house, we think it’s a pretty fair split.
I once read to split expenses proportionally by earnings. IE: 70/30 or whatever your proportional split may be… It worked well when we were younger in a newly minted relationship, but now everything just goes into one big pot. Complacent as we get older I guess?
Back in the day when I lived with my first boyfriend, we kinda just estimated. Kind of an “I’ll get this one, you get the next one” thing, mainly based on which one of us had the most money that month.
That worked for us, two people who don’t really give a shit about money. I suspect it wouldn’t work for people who really care about finances because they tend to count the pennies more