The following post first appeared as an answer to a question on Quora.
Having separate accounts has worked well for us, and it hasn't had any downsides I can think of.
We are lucky enough to be middle-class people with some disposable income. Perhaps we'd make different choices if we were poorer or if one of us earned a lot more than the other. As it happens, we earn roughly equal amounts.
Like many consumers, we both spend money on luxuries. Elsewhere, we can debate whether or not my wife should be buying so many handbags and whether I should be buying so many gadgets, but here I'll just take it as a given (since it is).
We have never once gotten into a fight about money. I'll be honest: I would not be happy if my wife bought yet-another-handbag with "our" money. I would also be hypocritical about it: I'm sure I'd get irritated if she griped at me about spending "our" money on an iPad. But we never deal with these sorts of conflicts. Yay!
We both have a responsibility to contribute to 401Ks, rent, etc., but once those needs are met, we are free to each do what we want with our separate pools of disposable income. If my wife buys a dress, I don't know if she spends $50 on it or $500, and I don't care.
Because some people get upset when they hear about marriages that are different from their own, I'll repeat: I am not preaching! You should do whatever works for you.
Here's an FAQ, based on the questions that have come up:
Doesn't this mean you have one foot out the door? Separate accounts means you are expecting to one day separate, right?
My wife and I co-own a company. Imagine if I said, "We own a company together because we expect to always be together." That would be an absurd statement. Just as absurd as "We keep separate bank accounts because we someday expect to be separate."
Both those statements are word games that make faux-logical claims based on repeated use of the words "together" and "separate."
Members of a couple are devoted to each other because they're devoted to each other, not because they have a joint bank account.
My wife is my best friend, and I'd be lost without her. Why on Earth would I want to be separate from her? That would be self-destructive.
If we split up I'd be agonizingly lonely. And maybe I'm fooling myself, but since I haven't met anyone else (in almost 50 years of life) that I've wanted to be with, my assumption is that if my wife and I broke up, I'd be lonely for the rest of my life.
Aside from all that, I am profoundly against divorce. I don't judge others who divorce. But I'm against it for myself. I made my wife a "til death do us part" promise. I meant it all those years ago, and I still mean it.
Do you know any divorced couples who, when they were married, had joint bank accounts? I do. Most of the parents of my childhood friends are divorced, and most of them had joint accounts. Pooling their money did not stop them from splitting up. It seems to be a pretty shoddy form of relationship glue.
You obviously don't have kids.
Right. We don't. Maybe if we did, we'd pool our money. Knowing us, what's more likely is that we'd set up an account for kid-related-expenses and both contribute to it. That's what we currently do for our business. (The business has a bank account, and we both write checks to it, because — alas — the business isn't profitable at the moment.)
Doesn't it get complicated? Who pays when you go out to dinner?
Usually one of us volunteers to pay for everything. There's no system. We go out to dinner, and I call for the check and pay it. After I've done that a couple of times, my wife will probably say, "I'll get it" the next time we go out. It's not something we consciously think about much. We just take turns.
In some cases, one of us has taken on responsibility for paying something. For whatever reason, I pay all the utilities. Because I'm clueless when it comes to clothes, my wife tends to buy both mine and hers.
We have all kinds of little quirky things we've worked out, but we never sat down with a spreadsheet and said, "I pay for this and you pay for that." We don't keep records. We don't say, "I paid last time, so now it's your turn." Too boring.
One year, I bought the two of us a cruise to the Bahamas. Another year, my wife bought us a trip to London. We recently went back to the Bahamas, and neither of us could afford it by ourselves, so my wife said, "I want us to go on a vacation. Will you pay half?" I said, "Sure."
We've never bought a house. Like most New Yorkers, we rent. We split the bill 50/50, but that's the only thing I can think of that we handle that way (aside from some business expenses).
This takes way more time to write about than it does to think about. Most of our bills are automatically deducted from our bank accounts, e.g. rent gets deducted from both and utilities get deducted from mine. Once a week, one of us treats us both to dinner.
How did you get started down this path?
By not putting any thought into it. It wasn't a plan. Like most people, we had separate accounts when we were dating. (We were both grad students living day-to-day, so neither of us had much in his or her account.) When we got married, we simply never talked about opening a joint account. It never came up.
I know that's going to sound odd to people, because (apparently) it's the norm. But we're not very traditional people. My wife's parents are dead and mine live far away. We never thought about "things you're supposed to do when you're married" besides love each other, be each other's best friend, support each other through sickness, etc.
Along the same lines, my wife kept her name (as many women do nowadays). This wasn't a Feminist statement or even a conscious choice, really. We never discussed it. Since we consider marriage to be about love, friendship, and support, name-changing doesn't enter into it. We can love each other just as well with different last names as with the same one.
All these things are more symbolic than practical. To some people, a ring on a finger is meaningful; to some, a shared name is meaningful; to some, a shared account is meaningful. I'm not knocking any of that stuff. My wife and I have our symbolism and rituals, too. But our symbolism isn't necessarily yours.
I can't argue with your logic, especially since it seems to work for you, but it still bothers me for reasons I can't explain.
I understand. If someone records a bad cover of your favorite song, it feels like they've ruined the song. If someone makes a bad movie of your favorite book, it feels like they've ruined the book. It's not rational, because the original song and book still exist. But it's a very, very common feeling. Rational or not, it can be extraordinarily heartfelt. So maybe it feels to you like my wife and I have made a bad cover of marriage.
Many married people feel they're not just in a union with their spouses. They feel they are part of something bigger: part of a tradition called "marriage"— an institution all couples co-author together. If one couple taints it, it's tainted for everybody. This is part of the reason some people are against gay marriage, even though "it doesn't hurt you." It hurts the tradition.
I am sorry if my wife and I are hurting the tradition for you. I really mean that. But I guess I'm selfish enough to keep doing one of the things that makes my marriage happy.
If it helps, I'll say this one more time: I don't think you should do what we do. I don't think couples should necessarily have separate bank accounts. I think they should do whatever works for them.
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