Money is the most common reason for fighting in a relationship. And yet, my husband and I never argue about money. It’s not because we’re perfect people, it’s because we’ve set ourselves up to be financially successful and to resolve issues before they even come up. It’s taken some trial and error, but our finances have been combined for about a year now and we’ve settle into a system that works for us with minimal stress and no arguing. How do we do it?

We combine our finances.

I understand that this isn’t the case for everyone, but it works best for both of us to combine our finances. In fact, we really basically combined finances before we were even engaged (not a great call for everyone, but we’d been dating for a couple years and knew we were getting married anyway). We have shared bank accounts and credit cards that all of our money goes into and our purchases come out of, with no personal accounts. This works really well for us because I’m the breadwinner right now while James is in school (he does work a job for the experience, which contributes to our finances as well). When James graduates and we have kids, then he will likely become the breadwinner. We both have our season to provide for the family, and so it works well and feels fair for us. It might not work as well for other couples who intend to be a double income family, and that’s okay. The important thing here is to talk about it and come to an agreement about what is right for you and your situation, whether that’s partially or fully combining finances, or something else.

We set up a budget.

Setting up a budget is bit of hard work initially, but it makes everything else easier. We’ve actually done this together twice because our income changed a few months ago. Both of us were using Mint to track our spending before marriage, so we already had a good idea about how much we spent on different categories. I get a bit of  thrill from spreadsheets, so I used those numbers to put together a budget that included everything from rent to eating out to our retirement accounts. Once I got everything balanced,  James looked it over and gave his input. I think this is why it’s worked os well for us, because while I did the initial set up, we both made changes and agreed to everything together instead of one of us forcing a budget on the other.

Now that we have a working budget, we set it up in Mint. Mint keeps track of all of our transactions and automatically logs them in our budget, so now either of us can log in and see exactly how much money we have in each category fo the month. This keeps us both on the same page about where we are and what we can spend.

We each have a personal budget.

This probably the secret to making shared finances and a budget work. This budget category accounts for things that aren’t necessities and aren’t for both of us. My husband tends to spend a lot of little money: soda, snacks, and other small amounts. I would rather cut out the small expenses and save for larger purchases like clothing and shoes. These different attitudes towards spending could cause strife in our life, but we’ve just budgeted a certain amount of personal spending for each of us. James gets to make a lot of little purchases and I can splurge about once a month and it works out to about the same amount. This way we don’t have to argue about purchases we don’t agree on; it just comes out of our personal budget. We also get to indulge in our personal pleasures without feeling guilty about impacting the other person, because the money is already budgeted for.

We set shared goals.

Before we got married, James and I sat down and talked about some of our financial goals. Having a nice retirement account is really important to me, though it’s something that James hadn’t really thought before about since he’s still in school. We know that we want to be able to buy a house in a few years when he’s out of school and settled in a real job, but we’re fine renting until then. We also want the security of having a fully funded 6 month emergency fund. We also discussed other smaller goals that we’re willing to sacrifice for now to focus on these goals, such as a nice, new car or a big trip overseas. Sitting down and talking about these goals has allowed us to be on the same page and start making good progress on these goals. It also means that we’re both on board with the sacrifices we have to make to meet these goals.

We set up autopay.

There are a lot of bills we have and they come due on different days. Instead of trying to decide whose responsibility it is to remember to pay them and worrying about forgetting one and being late, we just set up autopay. This works for us because all of our income is direct deposited into one account, and all of our bills come out of that account as well. If we had separate accounts it would be a little harder to set up, but not impossible.

We talk about money.

It doesn’t always happen, but we try to get together about once a month to discuss our money and budget. We look over the budget and see if there are any changes we need to make, or things we could have done better on. We discuss any upcoming big purchases we need to make. We also set any limits for upcoming events like birthdays or Christmas. This keeps us on the same page and keeps any financial surprises from sneaking up on us, which could cause a lot of stress.

Money can be a hard topic to talk about and a bit overwhelming if you don’t plan ahead. However, with some planning and communication, it’s not hard to set you and your partner up for financial success, without fighting about it.

Do have any tips about managing finances with a partner? I’d love to hear them!