Desmond, I’ve been married 22+ years. The first year of marriage the only fights we had were over money. Then we worked it out. Three checking accounts….a joint account for bills, and our own accounts. We both work, so we have a percentage automatically deposited to the joint account from our checks, the remainder of our checks goes into our own accounts. We’re DINKS, double income, no kids. Any large purchase we talk about. It works fine. We both have our own money and the bills (food, utilities, etc) get paid from the joint account. Our house is paid for, so the bills don’t amount to much anymore, which is nice and another factor that tends to cut down on fights. We live a rather simple life, but are happy. We have money allotted for an emergency fund in a money market account that we don’t touch (so far no big emergency). Currently we each have 15% of our before tax pay taken out for 401K and are doing some other investing. A marriage is a partnership and you share everything. You talk about everything and you should be friends and lovers. If you don’t have that kind of relationship and you don’t think it will ever be that way, end it. Life is too short. I’d give it a good shot at trying to make it work first and if it didn’t work, I’d divide everything up fairly and move on. But that’s just me.
