A Few Inspiring Expense Sharing Ideas for Married Couples

No couple will choose to tackle expense sharing ideas the same way. However, if you decide to make plans for your money, having a template or model to get started is helpful. We all have many of the same challenges. Credit cards, monthly expenses, debt payments, child care, and any number of other things that make us concerned about our financial future on a month-to-month basis.

But with a plan, we can begin to cut those streaming services and everyday expenses, take a closer look at our household expenses, look closer at where we can find extra money, and come up with a plan.

A Few Inspiring Expense-Sharing Ideas for Married Couples

No couple will tackle expense-sharing ideas the same way. However, if you decide to make plans for your money, having a template or model to get started is helpful. Start by discussing your financial goals and priorities, and create a budget that works for both of you. Consider setting up joint accounts for shared and individual accounts for personal expenses. Regularly review and adjust your financial plan to align with your evolving needs as a couple.

Why Talking About Money Matters

Money is a challenging issue in marriage for several reasons. Just like we bring our differing perspectives about life and how to do things to marriage, we also bring very different experiences about money. How we budget, whether it’s through an app like Rocket Money or a spreadsheet or by hand, we all have developed different ways to manage our expenses.

Keeping Your Information Safe

We are also sure to have different levels of financial security simply because it’s extremely rare to have identical financial backgrounds, and this is even more true in a marriage because we tend to complement one another.

Moving Through the Challenges

But no matter how challenging it might be, we must discuss money as part of our effort to have a healthy and peaceful marriage. It may take time and work, but with the best strategies, we can achieve our goals of transparency and productivity in our budgeting and financial plans.

More Expense Sharing Ideas

More than technique and training, conversations about finances are often derailed because of our emotional feelings about money and the reasons we spend. If it were just a matter of figuring out how much we should budget, that would be one thing. But the reality is that there is a psychology to spending that we must understand. For example, impulsively spending out of stress or fear of not having enough will affect our financial outlook.

Personalize Your Approach

Naming your emotional approach to money will be helpful throughout your marriage. You don’t need to make it complicated. Just call the emotions you feel when you do things like budgeting, saving, spending, and when money is under or over budget, for example, to start.

Understanding Your Spending

This exercise will help you understand why you spend the way you do and make any necessary changes. It will also help you better understand which areas to focus on more than others. Fixed costs like utilities rarely need adjusting. However, the areas related to convenience and comfort often present the most challenges.

Joint Expenses

Know that you have options for sorting out your finances as a couple. Don’t ever feel stuck using one method to understand your financial picture successfully. Regarding joint accounts, there are plenty of opinions about whether you should or shouldn’t do it or how or why. One of the reasons you may want to have joint accounts for your expenses is that you are splitting expenses to a certain extent. And to ensure visibility for you and your spouse when seeing your accounts. If you share joint accounts for joint expenses, it helps you to have equal visibility into how your payments are made for those accounts.

Keeping Your Options Flexible

A compliment to this approach is to keep separate accounts for your finances and payments that don’t directly involve your spouse. That way, you have some joint responsibility and room to do what you like and need to do individually. This doesn’t mean that you don’t still share what you’re doing with your accounts with your spouse. It just means you have some freedom to make payments, manage your finances, and meet your financial goals individually and as a married couple.

Be sure to discuss your plan’s details well before making a plan and sticking with it.

Budgeting Separately and Together

Another thing to remember is that just because you decide to pay bills one way does not mean you have to track bills the same way. For example, you might have all separate accounts, but you decide to discuss your accounts in detail together. You may have joint accounts, but when paying bills, you keep more privacy for yourself and how you manage finances. In this scenario, your budget breakdown is more of an overview than a line-by-line analysis. However, the more detail you are willing to review, the better.

Individual Bank Accounts

Individual bank accounts certainly have their place. Your shared goals and budgeting methods should be purposeful and help you get where you want to be. You will likely have individual debit cards, and married couples may also find a reason to have an additional account to cover irregular expenses and miscellaneous budget items. You may need a special budget to meet certain goals or to pay for the unexpected.

Tracking Where Your Money Goes

One of the best methods is the zero-based budget. With this budget, you have already determined your costs beforehand so that money doesn’t go missing in the middle of the month, for example. It works backward to ensure anticipated expenses eventually lead to a 0 line item.

Flagging Your Important Items

Flag the most common categories that you would like to track better. Typical examples are food and subscriptions. But you can always estimate costs for more trouble areas of your budget. Ensure your budget works on a 0 base to ensure you are not exceeding the limit you set.

Monthly Expenses

Tracing your credit cards or reducing them as much as possible is one of the main objectives or challenges we can face. Keeping monthly payments in check related to them is a great way to budget and will help with sharing expenses well. You can use a budget app like Rocket Money to keep your subscriptions current. Things like pet costs, auto insurance, and utility bills are other items that sometimes keep us guessing, but you can always look at your monthly bills throughout the year to realize patterns and plan accordingly.

Get Specific About Your Spending

Continue to make categories for every area. You’ll learn that your categories will be ever-changing. You will have surprises that you will decide whether it’s worth including in every month’s budget. You will also find that you may not need some areas of your budget permanently, and you can remove them as they are no longer a part of your routine.

Spiritual Inspiration for Money Management

Be encouraged to know that the Bible mentions money in many ways. From tithing principles to giving in other ways that are connected to and do not exclude money to passages about dealing with the heart and not giving compulsively, for example, there are plenty of foundational, solid practices to help us along the journey.

But it can be easy to become convinced that no one can relate to your circumstances.