How Do You Split Expenses with Your Partner or Spouse?
Forget the classic quandary about who pays for the first date. What do you do when things get serious? What about when you live together?
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How do you and your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife split your shared expenses? Do you have a joint checking account? A joint credit card? Do you each pay for certain things? Do you reconcile at the end of the month? Or do you just alternative haphazardly and “hope things even out in the end?” If you’re married or cohabitating, please let me know how you and your partner split expenses in a comment!
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25, Cohabiting with BF.
BF pays for everything (rent, food, utilities) and invoices me at the end of the month. Then I review the expenses and cut a cheque for the amount.
As for parking (he pays), or birth control (I pay), or other personal expenses, we take care of them on our own.
Fabulously Broke in the City
“Just a girl trying to find a balance between being a Shopaholic and a Saver.“
We each have our own checking account, and a joint account. Same thing with credit cards. Any joint household expenses are charged to the joint credit card, but anything that’s just for one of us (clothes, gifts, etc.) go on our personal cards. At the end of the month, we calculate the total cost of rent, joint credit balance, utilities, insurance, and then each of us transfers half of the amount to the joint checking account and then we pay everything out of that.
It works really well for us!
Not married, but living together. No joint accounts, we each buy our own things and then haphazardly split other things like movie, eating out, groceries. I try to pay for more since I earn more, but I do pay about 80% of the mortgage and she chips in the other 20% as rent plus half the utilities each month.
It seems to work out OK, but there are times when I’ll get flack if she feels I’m not paying for enough.
I’m engaged now but through our relationship, I never ask her to pay for anything. Every once in a while she insists and I let her but normally, my traditional values take over and I pay. Everybody is different.
Married. Doesn’t matter, all joint accounts. Set budget & goals together ~ once a year, stick to it pretty well. Both pretty frugal / financially conservative, so not much conflict.
+1 for Keri. That’s how my partner and I roll. Not married…yet.
My husband and I have everything joint. We have a budget that we’re both pretty good at following, and we both agreed on savings goals, etc. We don’t use credit cards much, so nearly everything comes out of our joint checking account.
My husband and I have one joint account which our paychecks go into and then all the bills and everything comes out of there. We don’t really get personal spending money right now but it’s something we want to start doing in the future. Right now we just gauge how we’re doing with our budget and if we have some extra room we’ll hit the ATM for $20 and split it (Yes, ::shock:: I know of an ATM that doesn’t make you get things out in $20 denominations, it uses $5 bills! ).
We only have one joint credit card which we keep cause I’ve had it since I was 18 and have never had a late or missed payment so it helps the FICO score. I also use it for business travel occasionally.
We usually do our spending with the money we give each other for Christmas or our birthdays. Each birthday and Christmas we give each other a set amount of money to spend however we want. Sometimes we split that as well. For instance, this Christmas we both wanted the new Guitar Hero so we split that cost 50/50 from our Christmas money.
My husband and I have a joint checking account and joint savings accounts, all of our regular bills go out of joint checking. We do maintain individual credit cards for business travel and other miscellaneous expenses (both cards get paid off in full each month; we use them for the rewards points). We established a set limit for purchases that we won’t exceed without discussing it with the other. We don’t have an established budget per se, but have established savings goals.
I have been living with my significant other for over 5 years. We recently just purchased our first home. I pay the mortgage and she pays all the utilities. All other activities together get paid by whomever wants to pick the tab up. We have not had any problems doing it like this. As long as I can swing the tab without having any problems I pick it up and vice versa.
Thanks for all the feedback, everybody. My fiancee and I have been discussing how to handle joint expenses now and in the future—and you all helped us out—and hopefully future readers, too. Cheers!
Watch out for sharing credit card accounts. If your partner has bad credit habits, it can pull you both down. Best to have separate accounts…Good information about what can happen in this article.http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/taking-charge-survey-relationships-1276.php. Have you heard of revenge rage? When the relationship sours and the other person goes on a vengeful spending spree to purposefully trash your credit.
My husband and I have our salaries deposited into my checking account. Everything comes out of that account and he has my debit card for that while I hold on to the atm card. That way any spends are tracked in one account, which is basically having a joint one. We each get $100 fortnightly for allowance as we get paid in that schedule. We call it our sanity money. We have a budget spreadsheet on Google Docs that is updated daily and has all outgoing spends already accounted for for the entire 2009. Savings also are accounted for in that budget and they come out of my checking. When we started tracking our finances, we didn’t bother getting a joint checking because I was the one very eager to track our spending. I’m the finance person in the family and he trusts me with his money so it works. Everything else we own and owe are joint.
My fiancee and I (going on 6 years now!) manage things separately and split all mutual expenses 50/50. I made a spreadsheet with a page for each of us and we basically ‘bill’ each other for half of whatever we paid for that month. The spreadsheet then tells us who owes who and how much. (it’s kind of slick!) So we each just spend money however we like and it doesn’t matter
My fiancee and I (going on 6 years now!) manage things separately and split all mutual expenses 50/50. I made a spreadsheet with a page for each of us and we basically ‘bill’ each other for half of whatever we paid for that month. The spreadsheet then tells us who owes who and how much. (it’s kind of slick!) So we do things separately (because we’re both budget nerds with our own systems), but we usually work on our finances at the same time and talk about our progress and goals and such while we do it. I actually love it this way because neither of us has to worry about the other’s day to day individual spending, but we still collaborate and back each other up and work towards mutual goals. And that’s the really important part.
Female, 22, married for 5 years.
My husband and I have all joint accounts. He has one credit card, and I have one credit card. We are each authorized users on each credit card. It isn’t my money or his money; it is our money. It may work for some people, but I would feel really odd “billing” my husband. Personally, I feel like there are emotional/psychological advantages to this (for us more specifically clear and clearly communicated financial, educational, life goals, feeling fully invested in each other and the relationship, etc). I don’t know if I’d feel the same way if he wasn’t as frugal as he was or if we didn’t have kids. Because he is frugal and we do have kids, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. My parents had separate accounts for separate purchases, but would tally up and split child/mutual expenses at the end of the month. Doing things that way weirds me out, but hey, that’s just me, I guess.
My girlfriend and I have been living together for 3 years. She feels it’s tthe man’s responsability to pay for everything…rent…utilities…food.
Our rent is $1000 per month plus the other necessities required to live.
She is paid weekly about $450.She is upset when I ask her to split everything….to her we are just “roomates” and not in a serious relationship. I explained to her even married couples split expenses and this offends her. Am I asking for too much here?
Steve-
No! You are not asking a lot. Get rid of her!
My BF and I fight alot. I make twice what he makes but, he can still afford splitting half the expenses. He is not maximally employed due to his own choices. I feel that if we split proportionally I am being taken advantage of. We have discussed pooling all the money and paying expenses out of that .. but he refused since some of the expenses are for my car and my life insurance. I agreed with him on that. I proposed that he decide how much rent he could afford and then I would find an apartment which costs twice that amount. I was willing to live in a less nice place in order to keep the rent 50/50. I am still saving to buy a new car and an apartment in NYC. I dont feel its fair for my savings goals to be impacted if he is not fully employed. He says I am being cheap. Besides breaking up, any advice?
Been married for 5 years, living together for eight and we have our own accounts. We pretty much divvy up the monthly expenses as such:
I take mortgage and home/auto insurance
She takes all utilities (cable phone water trash etc)
we split the grocery bill 50/50
we each pay for our own car payment
and we treat one another to dinner constantly.
Any big expenses we discuss a plan accordingly
Initially after being married we argued about this as my wife was embarrassed that we swiped two cards at the grocery store. After that ordeal we added one another to each account, but really that is purely for the event of an emergency. Truth be told we have never bounced a check, never felt like we were strapped and have been able to mutually save a lot.