If there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading APW, it’s that finances are something we need to be talking about. Right now there are a lot of troubling conversations being had within our generation about finances, worth, and the division of wealth. And that’s the good news. Because the bad news, I’m finding out, is that there are lot of us who just aren’t talking about our finances at all (and that’s with our partners, let alone each other). I’ll admit, I don’t think Michael and I have exactly figured it out yet ourselves. It took us three years of marriage to fully merge our finances (I literally got the debit card for our joint account two months ago) and we still have a hard time saying “our money,” but we’re working on it.
So today, Carisa and Addison are sharing their model for managing finances in a same-sex partnership, complete with the added challenge of being in a relationship not recognized by the federal government. Would their model work for you? Maybe. Maybe not. But the point is, the conversations they are having about how and why they manage their finances as they do are the conversations we need to be having with our partners right now. In the meantime, for those of you just starting these conversations, I found these early APW posts from Meg on marriage and finances to be hugely influential when it came time for Michael and I to figure this all out. But as Meg said in her original text, our answer to family finances isn’t necessarily the right one. And Carisa and Addison’s might not be either. So if you’ve got a system you love, bring it to the table. Or if you’re still trying to figure it out, bring that too. The point is, let’s talk about this.
—Maddie
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My partner and I were together for roughly five years before we moved across the country together. Before we moved we kept a fairly meticulous list of who owes whom what and would pay out at the end or beginning of each month. When we moved, even after buying a car for the move, we never discussed any other financial plan. Then reality hit. I was making double her income working ten to fifteen fewer hours a week, and we had to have our first real discussions about finances that were not just, “Hey you owe me this.” We wanted to do things as a couple and needed to figure out a system that kept some sort of balance around money despite an unequal income.
As discussed a number of times on APW, finances are less than sexy. Unfortunately, finances become a whole different ball game when the federal government sees you as no more than roommates, when marriage isn’t a tangible marker of relationship stability, or if you aren’t down with marriage at all. We had to come up with our own way of dealing with money.
I was terrified because even the act of tallying what we owed each other was abhorrent to me. It was the opposite of the care and generosity we show each other. To add fuel to the fire, I grew up with a horrible model of finances. My parents fought when my dad made more money than my mom, they fought when my mother made more than my dad, they fought when there was no money and when there was lots of money. I wanted a different pattern of existence around money when I grew up.
Addison, on the other hand, grew up with her mother in control of the finances and significantly fewer battles in the house around money. I had always liked the idea of pooled money, but I was afraid of being taken advantage of, or worse, letting my mother down because she worked so hard to keep her finances her own.
What I found was…it wasn’t awful! Combining our finances meant we both have so much more room to breath and make big decisions together. Our way of combining finances also took into account the cultural mania around money, even in intimate relationships. Both of us come from women and gender studies backgrounds, so we started every conversation with what makes both of us feel the most valuable, from there we got the following setup.
- Our accounts stay separate, but we have a joint credit card. This allows us to surprise each other and treat ourselves sometimes. Eventually (when we have more money all around) we want to be able to have a truly pooled account and separate fun money.
- In order to make the separate account situation work we have a single spreadsheet of all family incomes and expenses. The money we make is in separate accounts but tallied as one amount when talking about what our finances look like. Continue reading Remember the Lesbians: On Finances
