Before Marriage, Were Your Expenses Intertwined?

Ours are slowly intertwining, but we haven’t sat down and said I pay this and you pay that. While my FH lives with me, we are still working to sell his house so we both currently pay our own mortgage and bills. We share things like groceries, gas, and streaming services.

Yes, we both have designated bills and pay a certain amount for rent (I pay a lower percentage). We are house hunting in this crazy market where everything is selling two seconds after it’s listed, so it’s been a journey to say the least.

We have a joint savings but each individually pay our own bills such as he pays for his car and car insurance, same as me. We split internet and electric 50/50. Rent he pays a larger portion because I make less, but I pay more in groceries. I pay out phone bill. We each have our own individual checking accounts. We agreed that when/If we decide to have a family we will do a joint ✔account. Right now, the system we have works for us

We lived together 4 years before we even got married so our bills definitely intertwined. I paid for my car & phone and he did the same. As far as bills for our home, we used to split them but he recently started paying more now that he has an additional tax-free income. We each have our own accounts and we also have a joint account as well

We've been together for almost 7 years, and just bought our first home together last month. Our bills have intertwined unintentionally.

We have a joint savings account to we each deposit into every week on Payday, this pays our mortgage, electric, oil and internet.

When we bought our house my aunt, who is our insurance agent, found we can lower both of our car insurances if we go on to the same policy, we haven't officially done it yet but when we do FH will pay that as he currently pays for his own car insurance and our policy together will be almost $100 lower than what he was paying on his own. (My parents still pay my car insurance as they stated they'd pay until I was done with school, I just graduated last December so I'm riding it out with them until we do the switch which I am 100% thankful for) FH also pays our phone bill out of his Personal Checking, if I have extra money to throw at our device installments I do but he is primarily responsible for that.

I pay for all of our groceries and subscription services since we don't have cable.

We are each responsible for our own debt payments as far as our car payments, Credit Cards and any loans we may have.

Once married I intend on reassesing our finances as I think if we fully combine our Finances fully we can each pay off our debt much faster and have more fun money than we do now!

Ours have been combined basically since day one since we started living together very early into our relationship (together 7 years)

We split the rent (currently he pays rent while I put my half into our wedding savings account). Groceries are split unless one of us feels like treating the other and footing the bill. He typically pays for all dinners and outings. I'll sometimes Venmo him my share of the outings expenses if it was a lot of money, but he doesn't expect me to.

He pays for power and our Hulu subscription while I pay for WIFI and Netflix, Disney+. Our phones are on separate accounts so we pay our own phone bills. Unless he's the one taking our dog to get groomed and to the vet, I pay for the dog stuff!

We pretty much just communicate when it comes to expenses and who pays for what. I think it's helped us a lot having our expenses intertwined because we already know how the other person handles their money, and whether we can trust the other person to pay bills on their own, or pitch in on something!

We moved in together several years before getting married. When we moved in together, we opened a joint checking and would put equal amounts of money into it from every paycheck (we made about the same amount back then) to go towards rent, utilities, groceries, etc. Once we got married, we transitioned to that being our primary checking account and then also added each other on any individual credit cards, moved to the same car insurance plan (which actually saved us a bit of money as well), etc. Our finances are now completely intertwined. This works out well for us, but it is not a system that works for everyone.

We've been living together for a good portion of our relationship, so our expenses have been intertwined for a while. We bought a house 3 years ago together and combined our insurance because it saved us both some money. We have a joint account for joint bills like the mortgage, we have a joint payment for some household appliances that comes out of that account as well. We split other bills. He pays our oil and electric/solar bill, I pay our car insurance and for groceries. We split our water bill. We've kept our cell phone bills separate so we pay for those individually, and any other individual bills we have we pay for individually and will probably continue to do so even after we are married.

We lived together for 5 years prior to getting married so finances were pretty intertwined for a while now. For many years we split all shared bills 50/50 (rent, utilities, groceries) with him picking up date nights and other random items. Now, he makes quite a bit more than I do. We split rent 50/50 and generally split utilities and cable. He pays for all car related expenses and will often pay for groceries and other household items. I definitely spend more on “apartment stuff” like decorating and cooking utensils. It’s been pretty fluid, nothing is defined and our bank accounts are not combined. We work off communication.

Yes! And not that I recommend this to others AT ALL because everyone is different, but we actually had a joint bank account A year into dating. We had been together 10 years before we just got married. It’s sort of one of those things where we just really connected right off the bat. I certainly never had any joint bank accounts with any of my prior boyfriends. He was on my life insurance policy 4 years into dating and I was on his. We just sort of knew. But I have to say, having a joint bank account has definitely helped us budget and save like you wouldn’t believe! There’s been a lot of studies that have been done on this as well that show that joint bank accounts also help couples be more financially stable. Sometimes it’s better to have two sets of eyes on an account that one. Also working together as a financial team will help you both establish your goals together and not individually.

We moved in together a year and 3 months into dating, but did not have a joint account until we got married. We split the rent 60/40 when we were dating/engaged, and groceries 50/50. Now we pay both from our join account.


Now married, we put 60% of our income into our joint account and 40% to individual accounts. We did not combine premarital assets except for my HSA since he's on my insurance.

Absolutely! we opened up a joint savings and a credit card before we got engaged.

We actually just opened a shared savings account for the wedding that we'll try and keep open for vacations and emergency items.

Otherwise we split which bills we're doing. The house we live in is mine, I bought it about 2 years into our relationship, but I pay the house payment alone.

He currently covers our water/trash bill, internet, cell-phone, and groceries. Then he handles his own student loans, car payment/insurance, etc.

I do the house payment, gas, electric, and my student loans, childcare expenses and what have you. We both pretty well cover the different streaming services.

We moved in together well before we were engaged, so we started splitting a lot of costs. Things are *still* in my name, mostly because I lived here first. Every so often, we revisit how much each of us is paying relative to how much we are bringing in, to keep it fair.

We only just opened a joint account this year, with the stimulus. But we are mostly using it for saving... probably until the baby gets here.

Finances tend not to be static. It's always good to be flexible about what's going on. I had some trouble with unemployment earlier this year, so DH, whose job had come back, started taking on a lot of the regular, non-bill expenses (food, etc.), until my income got straightened out. Then we adjusted again.

We started officially living together a year and a half after we got engaged, we were supposed to get married last year but it got postponed to this year.
As of now we have separate bank accounts. Rent is pretty much split and we each have our responsibilities ( he takes care of internet and cable, I pay for utilities). We don’t keep tabs but each try to contribute so that neither is not taking on a bulk of the financial burden. When we do get married finances will be more combined.

We’ve been living together about a year and a half. My finances and his are separate (bank account wise), but we share bills for food, helping family, stuff like that. Other than that I won’t get a joint account until after we are married. For instance any car loan and credit cards are individual. We help each other with wedding planning, vendors etc. as that is a joint effort.