A Shared Budget

Want to know whether a family is happy? Ask how many budgets it has. Separate finances all but guarantee that a strong emotional bond will never form.

If you want to know whether a family is happy or not, ask how many budgets it has.

In my view, there should be one budget — a shared one.

If there is more than one, I’ll bet 99.9% that this marriage will run into serious trouble in many different areas.

In our culture, money is a sacred subject for a lot of people. So a man and a woman can get married, have three children, plan some kind of future together, share a bed, solve a pile of problems — and still keep separate budgets. And that is an enormous problem.

Separate budgets alone are enough to make sure a strong emotional bond never forms between a husband and a wife.

Even if we’ve never taken an interest in psychology, on a subconscious level we feel it: if the person we love won’t let us into their finances, then they don’t fully trust us. And where there is no trust, there is essentially nothing.

That’s why I believe that when we marry, the income becomes shared. Not the husband’s money and the wife’s money separately, but our money and our income.

That doesn’t mean all the money sits in one place or in one account. I believe both the husband and the wife should always have money available — both for household needs and for spontaneous personal spending. It’s just that a shared budget comes with certain agreements:

• What are we buying next, and why?
• What do we spend money on, and what do we not?
• How do we make financial decisions?

And so on.

When we have a shared budget, it shows that we genuinely trust each other and know how to reach agreements.

P.S. Of course, a shared budget on its own doesn’t guarantee a happy marriage — but the lack of one guarantees a very hard and painful relationship.