My wife and I have been married 7 years and we just got a joint account last year so we could deposit a check endorses to us jointly. We have two kids together, but sharing finances seems terrifying.
We split them up, roughly based on ability to pay. It reduces friction, but the downside is that I think it reduces our ability to optimize expenditures. (You don’t have two person sign off on most expenses.)
My wife and I basically do this with a joint checking account + credit card that we contribute to (somewhat unequally) every month an amount that is designed to cover 1 month's of expenses plus a little buffer.
I find it makes it a lot easier to know that $X thousand/month is my "family expense" and then everything for that is easily accounted for in a way that is totally separate from my personal finances.
I actually have two separate mint accounts, one for family expenses and one for my personal stuff.
That makes a lot of sense. We’ve been trying to set that up just for simplicity of keeping track of auto payments and whatnot, but it’s so hard to switch everything over.
