Your Money or Your Wife?

or Husband, that is.

Articles like this, in hand with my personal space issues, largely fuel why I don't believe I'll get married again. (Or if I do, I'll do it in a very Frida Kahlo-Diego Rivera way and have a separate house and fiscal considerations).

This conversation came up on the way to boot camp where a friend of mine and I discovered that a third friend had a completely separate, secret account that her husband of 5 years did not know about. She stated that she needed it for her own security because, as a previously divorced woman and child of a single parent, she realized that it's a bit of a dog-eat-dog world out there and you don't want to be caught wearing Milk Bone underwear. I think, incidentally, that this is a perfectly serviceable option for a man or woman in a committed relationship with the following provisos:

• the funds of said account come exclusively from the earnings of the account holder
• the account was open before the marriage
• you have no problem at all that your spouse probably has one, too.

And here's the rub: rarely is that considered a square deal going both ways. I don't know the friend of friend well enough to know if she would be piqued or completely accepting of her husband having a "secret" account, the problem with those being that if they are found out the larger issue is why the secrecy.

Fiscally speaking, there are three ways to do this and different strokes work for different folks. Actually, a few of these are exemplified by a few of the couples I know directly:

• Couple A is married, has/will have kids, homeowners, both professionals. Couple A has completely joint finances, administered by him or her or them. This works because she is good about saving money and he is good about investing it, or they're both on the same fiscal plan with the potential understanding that shortly one income will go away as she raises the kids.
• Couple B is married and/or living together, not having children, homeowners, both professionals. Couple B has what I call semiseparate finances, administered by themselves, wherein a joint account is established to pay off communal bills. This works for them really well because they communicate. (X and HER had this plan, too, it didn't work so well...something about the communication...?)
• Couple C -- a couple I don't know directly but have heard about -- have *completely separate everything*. I mean everything. The apocryphal story is that when they went to Home Depot to pick out blinds, they each swiped the card for exactly 50%.

Now I'm really a big fan of the "A" method -- I did it in my own marriage, I was both the saver and the investor -- but it only works if you want to be in that position and if you start out early enough that you don't have a separate vision of what the money does and should do. X and I got married quite young, so that was handy.

I'm also a really big fan of the "B" method -- If you have joint expenses then it's a "good faith" move to have a joint account with auto deposit and shared billpaying duties. That's just polite (and politeness counts, folks, to your spouse as much as to anyone else).

I'm not so much about the "C" method-- If things are so separate that they can't square up over the weekend while paying bills and have to do it right then, I think they have larger issues.

Speaking of larger issues, which is more damaging: fiscal infidelity or emotional infidelity or physical infidelity? To me, that last is just a lagniappe, nice to have but probably impractical in our current social clime (whatever rules you have agreed with your S.O. should prevail, though-- again keeping in mind that what is good for the goose is good for the gander). However, emotional infidelity -- and I think most women would characterize this as romantic affection toward another person without preconsent of the original wife/girlfriend/etc. -- seems to do far more damage to a woman than does fiscal infidelity. This is interesting to me, because (having been through heartbreak, one and all) you know you'll get over the emotional cost of a relationship in a year or two. But bad credit? That can follow you for years and years and years. 

Say it with me, kids: Prenup!