2/2/2011 - 30 years of our lives, amortized. . .

This morning, I saw a column on Slate.com entitled, "Marriage Finance: Having joint plus separate accounts."  As I am the one in charge of the finances between me and Sam, it definitely caught my attention.  I struggled with this very question for a long time before finally deciding on the "Sometimes Sharer" model described in the column.

The couples who "sometimes share" pool some of their combined income, but leaves some, a little or a lot, alone.  I felt that this would be the fairest way to manage our finances, as I know myself, and if given even the slightest opportunity, I will run amok and micromanage Sam's spending.  We have diametrically opposite spending habits; one guess as to who is the fiscal conservative.

For the first year or two of our relationship, we tried to be 'organically' equal.  One dinner out would be on me, the next would be on him.  If he bought our movie tickets, I would buy lunch.  In a way, we reinvented 'going dutch' so that it carried the look of togetherness while fiercely preserving the safety of individuality.  It was a safe approach at first, equitable and utilitarian, but soon grew to become burdensome.  We had to remind ourselves, silently so it didn't seem like we were keeping score even though we both were, who bought the last meal, who last picked up the groceries.

We then decided to take a baby step and open a joint checking account funded by a preset amount from our respective paychecks.  It was a small amount, and the account was used only to make big purchases (the first being a couch).  This, too, effectively became a burden within a few months.  Sam would never remember to transfer money into it, at times even forgetting his online log-in.  I, therefore, reminded him monthly, which made him feel hounded.  And we still did not address the everyday small purchases that happen much more often than couches.

We only decided to just dive in and adopt the "Sometimes Sharer" method after we bought our loft, after we jointly owned and owed together.  But even then, I was hesitant.  My parents' oft-repeated advice kept echoing in my head: do not mix money and friendship.  And I've largely kept to that advice, holding all previous partners, people I considered to be much more than friends, at financial arm's length.  But Sam was different.  We were different.  How can we maintain our separate assets when we were already deeply intertwined in debt??

So something had to change, and I, being the good Asian that I am, devoted many a free hour thinking of how to best manage our money.

After we closed escrow and officially got the keys, I took a day off with every noble intention of spending that day cleaning and unpacking while Sam went to work.  So two problems with that.  One: Sam is very particular about housecleaning, and when I say particular, I mean anal retentive.  And when I say cleaning, I mean eradicating all traces of germs from our lives and countertops.  And two: after I half-heartedly wiped down half of the refrigerator shelves, I got sidetracked by the fact that I was standing in something that would eventually cost us 30 years of our lives, amortized.  So, when I thought of it that way, cleaning seemed rather pointless.  

Instead, I decided to create a financial Powerpoint proposal for Sam.

The presentation was quite the dog-and-pony show, with snazzy slide introductions and text boxes flying in from this and that side of the screen.  All to soften the blow of my grand master plan: to establish a dizzying array of joint and individual credit cards and officially consolidate most of our money in a vast combination of similarly structured accounts with a slew of purposes, from paying bills to discretionary spending to saving up for a second home.  All would be automated to minimize any effort in the future by asking our respective HR departments to slice up our paychecks into different sized pieces and direct-deposit them accordingly.  It took me over an hour to think and draw out the flowchart, what card gets used when and which account pays for what, but hey, anything not to be cleaning.

I anticipated some push-back, some hesitation and a lengthy discussion on our relationship and trust and the like.  Lucky for me, Sam is very low-key, takes on a laissez-faire approach to most things.  He came home, took one look at the dirty state of the house, and asked what I had done all day.  After walking him through a presentation more thoroughly drafted than most of the ones I create for work, he shrugged and said, "OK."

And that was that.

So far, it's working quite well.  Of course, there are still days where he feels micromanaged, when I ask him why he has to buy the organic, unbleached, free-range eggs as opposed to the everyday white ones that were a third the cost, why the word "Premium" or "Deluxe" on box labels automatically grabs his attention.  But if I take a step back, ignore the minutiae of nickels and dimes, I think we do OK, and I'm glad that we don't have some of the issues that the couples interviewed for the column described.  At the very least, it's rather amazing to see how far we've come, from barely managing one measly joint account to a small army of them.