I am refering to couples who’ve decided to spend their life together, married or otherwise.
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The notion of separate finances is pretty unusual in Romania, but I keep encountering it when reading posts from the US.
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Here, whatever a couple earn while being together is considered common property.
The idea of “my money” / “your money” / “paying me back” / not knowing what the other person earns is unheard of.
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Financial decisions are taken together, even if it involves resources they owned from before becoming a couple.
And they will certainly pool those resources together if they need to make an investment / down payment / you get the idea.
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(Portugal) its more common as having one personal account and one account together, if anything goes wrong or you want to buy something, go for it, with your account. the “couple account” is for activities that involve both and for stuff like house bills and food, etc.
you always have a backup in case something goes wrong and you Lways buy what you want when you want, no permission needed from the other.
also the money out into the “couple account” comes from both parties and usually is a % or a fixed amount.
(I don’t do that because sounds odd but I know a lot of people who do it)
When married: seems weird to me to have completely seperate finances.
When the couple is not living together (yet) it’s pretty common.
> but I keep encountering it when reading posts from the US.
Probably has to do with their system of insane tuition fees, so it might be feasible to keep seperate finances.
I think we do something where people have a joint account for bills and stuff – and usually the amount you put in is proportional to your earnings – but people will maintain a personal chequing account for no-permission-needed scenarios.
Like, people don’t call their spouses every time they spontaneously want to buy lunch, y’know?
From personal experience I’d say that having shared economy is more common from the moment you get children and are in the age around 40 and up. Among younger people It’s common to have personal accounts but one shared account where you put money for example sharing rent/housing, food budget and stuff like that.
We are in our early 30s and most couples our age keep separate finances.
We have a shared bank account but our salaries are paid to our personal accounts, then each month we transfer a certain sum to the shared account for mortgage, bills, other shared expenses.
I’m not in the best position to talk about this considering I’m not married/in a serious relationship, but I know my parents had 1 account in common, plus 1 extra personal account each. I couldn’t say if it’s the case of most couples tho.
Edit : Looked it up and apparently 2/3 of French couples (married/in a serious relationship) share an account with the entirety of their money. More precisely: 85% of couples with kids do it, 51% for those who don’t.
We both have personal accounts and one shared account for bills and unexpected expenses. This account is also used to save up for vacations if we think of travelling a year later.
If I want a new expensive item I’ll buy after asking as it is kind of an agreement between us to have some impulse control.
If you marry and don’t do any legal proceedings about it, it’s shared. Couples may often work with “my pay and your pay, don’t care and we just save together and pay together only for the house and the car” but legally it doesn’t matter, anything you get during marriage, be it money or debt (except few exemptions) is shared. And your “inner agreement” has no effect towards others. That’s why you also need an agreement for bigger debts/purchases from the partner or they may dispute it.
But you can make an agreement that there will be no joint property or that something won’t be part of it. It’s not uncommon. But it must be through notary.
But of course cases where there is only one signel bank account for both of them and they literally share all their money is also not uncommon. But more among older people.
Not sure about other people, but my parents both have their own personal accounts for their personal spending and then a joint account for mortgage/ house maintenance/ food/ bills etc that they both put money into each month.
i’m in the US and my boyfriend and i are 22 and 23. we live together in a small house we rent and completely pool our money, treating it like a tit for tat so that it’s fairly equal based on what each of us can give. it’s sad that most americans seem to be more selfish. i got dogpiled like i’ve never seen in my life on r/frugal from people screaming at me that i’m a dependent freeloader to my boyfriend when i kept insisting that we were a UNIT and *together* we were independent. i contribute a great deal as well but i guess those pathetic losers can’t wrap their heads around healthy partnerships.
In Spain, both models are used and common, and the couple decides which financial regime they are going to use, and they can also agree to change their financial regime.
like 60-75% (I don’t have updated figures) of married couples choose to have joint goods, while the other % marry with separation of goods.
But this figure is biased because people marrying tends to be more traditionalist. Most couples don’t get to ever marry and it’s very rare for an unmarried couple to be in a common goods regime (there’s no legal figure for the commonhold in this case, but it’s possible to do it in practical terms, and some do it).
Seems weird to me to have everything separate or not to share. We have separate bank accounts and a joint savings.
We eat the same food, pay the same mortgage, go out together. If we want to buy something for ourselves, we just buy it. If one of us has less in our account towards the end of the month, the other might pay for something.
There many people who legally don’t share finances/assets (it’s called rozdzielność majątkowa).
But if you’re married/defacto married and especially if you have children, having actual seperate finances is very uncommon. I’ve never heard of anyone doing it. Seems impractical too.
If you live together, you tend to share finances but that’s just because living together is the step that shows commitment and an intention of the relationship lasting. I don’t think we’re any different to most countries on this matter
It used to be extremely uncommon to have separate economies if you’re married and/or live together and have children together. I think it still is uncommon but I have a counter example and that’s my aunt.
She has two children together with her partner (not married) but they keep separate economies. They even own shares in two separate summer houses.