Yours, Mine & Ours
Posted by Danielle Bean in Marriage on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 10:00 AM
I was listening to a popular radio talk show in the car the other day and a particular caller caught my attention.
It was a woman calling in to complain about the fights she always seemed to get in with her husband over money. The show’s host asked for a few details about the couple’s financial practices and then concluded that the problem was that they pooled their money.
“You need your own bank account with your own money in it,” she advised the young wife and mother.
Well now. I have not had one of those since I got married. And I happen to like it that way.
Maybe it’s because we got married young and didn’t have time to develop a sense of “yours” and “mine” when it comes to money, or maybe it’s because we aren’t exactly swimming in the cash around here anyway, but I feel no need to separate our finances.
Early in our marriage, I did not work, but I never thought of the money Dan earned as “his.” We just did different kinds of things to support our family. We worked for each other, at home and in the workplace. Any money that came in was “ours.”
Now that I do earn some money, I still happily sign my checks and hand them over to Dan who deposits them in our joint account. He pays the bills and I always check with him before spending significant amounts of money. This only makes sense because I don’t consider any of it “mine.” It’s “our” money.
Though we have never done it, I definitely see the wisdom in allowing both parties in a marriage to have a budgeted amount of “spending money” each week or month to use as he/she sees fit. I also think that some couples might very happily keep separate bank accounts for a variety of reasons.
But the talk show lady’s insistence that all couples should keep separate finances did not sit well with me. I think keeping separate bank accounts would work against the spirit of shared goals, shared circumstances, and the common good that we have worked hard to develop in our marriage.
I am curious, though, to know how other Catholic couples handle this and the reasons why they choose to keep joint or separate finances. What do you do and why?
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