Couples: Manage Your Money Together

Teamwork makes the dream work, especially in finances. Here’s why couples who manage their money together are financially stronger.

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I’ve mentioned I’m helping a lot of people with their personal finances right now. Selfishly, it helps me to see what people are going through, what mistakes they’re making as I put together the rewrite of “The Wealthy Barber.”

Well one thing I’m seeing over and over again, reminding me of an old pet peeve, and that’s couples who manage their money separately. It is not the right way to go. You know, a lot of writers out there say, “Ah do whatever you want. We don’t really care about that.” And I kind of was in that camp 30 and 40 years ago.

But then when I started seeing everybody’s financial plans, it was really clear that couples who manage their money together—they both saw what was going on, they made the decisions together, they allocated the capital based on the total needs, the total best moves—were way further ahead. It wasn’t close.

I don’t want to see a situation where one of the spouses has money in the bank earning two and three percent and the other spouse has a 21 percent credit-card balance. That doesn’t make sense. Now some people argue, “Well, we don’t want to have perfectly commingled finances. We want some privacy.” Fine. Then work out some sort of plan where X amount of money goes to each spouse each month and goes into a separate account and they can spend as they wish.

But the big-picture stuff should be talked about jointly and worked on to make sure that strategically you’re making the right move for the couple as a whole. This is a fairly big deal. I will tell you from seeing it over the years, couples who manage their money together do much better with their finances than couples who manage their money separately.

Are there a few exceptions? Of course. But for the most part, I’m telling you this is bang on.