Because it's simple and easy? I trust my partner; she trusts me; we discuss expenses beyond some fuzzy threshold that we both seem to understand intuitively.
The alternative seems to require spreadsheets. Who pays for the kid's daycare? Who pays what percentage of the mortgage, and what ownership stake does that represent? What if someone's income goes dramatically up, or dramatically down?
It sounds exhausting.
Childcare: family/friends/old lady at church whose kids have moved out long ago.
Mortgage: your tenants. Ownership stake? 50/50 profit-sharing split on sale. Don't finance a depreciating asset that doesn't generate a lick of cashflow.
Then again, I don’t live in the US; people here (or maybe it’s just my circle) are less pre occupied with money and lawsuits. Even the most messy divorces I know of from my friends didn’t need lawyers.
This doctrine developed into the various marital property laws we have today. Of course the wife no longer loses legal personhood, but the married couple itself still retains a kind of legal personhood, a couple can own property jointly, and when the marriage is dissolved the marital property needs to be redistributed back to the “shareholders” by a court.
At the same time, another change was happening: the cultural acceptance of divorce. While not so long ago, divorce was unthinkable for most, in modern times it’s completely normal.
So the law of marital property has developed based upon a model of lifelong marriage, whereas culture has embraced divorce and remarriage.
There is another culture that has a cultural acceptance of divorce and that’s the Arabs. But because they developed their marital property law afterwards, with the prospect of divorce and remarriage built in, it turned out in a completely different way. Instead of viewing the married couple as a single legal person (i.e. marriage as a corporation), they viewed the couple as individuals with a contractural arrangement, forbidden to interfere with each other’s property.
Because you have to in order to cohabitate? Just because two people do not use a joint account does not mean they both are not incurring shared expenses, i.e. commingling finances.
Rent/mortgage/property tax/home insurance/food/energy/kids/etc.
Your response implies that its unhealthy to speak openly and clearly about finances. It's much healthier to be concrete and open about how money is managed rather than having some vague understanding or not talking about it at all. If you have a clear understanding that you've both agreed on, then a joint account doesn't provide any benefit.
Just because you do something doesn't mean you agree with it.
Stay at home moms which take care of multiple children full time typically do not earn an income
If you offload your responsibility of paying your expenses upon another, you surrender that freedom to them.
If a couple wants equality, have separate finances and incomes and make agreements as to how any financial matters that must be handled together should be handled.
Most couples will try to cover shared expenses with their combined income and then equally distribute the remainder, so that neither of you is left wanting. Of course if you're the one making significantly more (or a sole income provider) you might see this arrangement as mooching or unfair as you're contributing more. But there's more dimensions you can contribute to in a relationship than just financial, and hopefully both partners can recognize that.
Budgeted amount for say toilet roll.
Decide whose bank account to use for it.
How to re balance as expenses change.
For each expense or group of expenses.
Each spend kinda needs to be tagged. It is a lot more work.
Might be OK if you have no kids and are renting.
This ruins the child
This is the problem with all these "marriage is best for the children" pieces that get published. They don't (can't?) look at situations that show what would happen if their agenda, to force people to stay married, was actually carried out. They can only see that a stable household under existing conditions has good outcomes. That's hardly a surprise. The question is whether a child in an unstable household gets a better outcome with that specific household staying together 'for the children', and my guess there would be no.
I know some successful 'ruined' children who would probably take issue with your summation there too.
While it is probably true that it is easier on the parent to have another person which is always there to help each other out, I doubt—all else being equal—this has any significant difference on the child.
But also even if we allow that there is benefit in a stable, two-parent household in which the parents don't change around at all, if we can even isolate that variable away from other factors, it seems tautological.
To make an analogy that's close to my heart right now -
In a drinking water capture system, you can probably collect the most water in a pristine, well-designed system where all the pipe gauges are the same and the fixtures are all well fitting and designed for the duty they perform. But if you haven't got one of those, if the one you have is full of holes and leaking all over the place every time it rains, and the pipes are jammed onto each other with no consideration of size or gaps, then ramming bits of cork into the leaks and praying isn't going to make it perform as if it was. Sometimes you're going to get better results if you rip out the downpipes, dig up the junctions and fit major parts of the system again.
Sure, it still might not be quite as good as that well-designed, perfect system, and you're probably going to get PVA glue all over your hands and clothes while you do the work, but it'll be a darn sight better than watching your drinking water piss out all over the veranda every time it rains...
I'm not sure if this comment is about divorce any more. Right, I'm off to buy more pipe fittings, grrr mumble mumble.
Who can do this? Who can possibly guarantee anything about the future, especially when it involves other people?
There are a lot of variables that go into the success of a marriage that can't be predicted, especially over a 20+ year timeframe. The idea that you can reliably predict if someone'll be happy in their marriage decades later is... unsupported.
In the US at least, being raise by a single parent is a massive statistical indicator for basically every negative social outcome. Poverty, criminality, future generational single parenthood, etc.
Aside from that my anecdote is no less scientific than your conjecture. Correlation is not causation, it is far more likely that this statistical indicator comes from a third variable, say poverty.
USA has a abysmal social safety network. Single parents are left to fend for them selves, without protections in the workplace (meaning they can loose their jobs), without child sick leave, without financial support, with unavailable and unaffordable child care, etc. etc. Of course a kid raised under these conditions is gonna be statistically more likely to correlate with other negative outcome.
PS. I’m slightly insulted you unapologetically put future generational single parenthood in the category of negative social outcome. As if you’ve already concluded that it is bad.
If you have children I'm not sure how you can avoid this. You have to share the care of the kids. One of you is going to take a hit in your earnings. Be that in extra sick days or for her the maternity leave. I don't think you can account for the work sharing evenly, so I don't think it's fair to try and account for the financial sharing.
That's putting it delicately.
Quite a number of judges have straight out ruled that prenuptial agreements are not binding making this a free for all. The resulting judicial caused disaster often is what's catastrophic as opportunism shines through.
What does this even mean, how do you "at scale" something between two people?
My wife and I have a joint account, all money goes in, things for the family come out of it, we get allowances out for our personal things. If one of us spends the money on our personal things without consulting the other, then that person values X over the family, QED.
I think you might be implying that "family values have failed at scale" but that's a different, cultural thing, that is probably tied to a lot of different factors especially media. It's not that family values themselves are bad.
Been married 25 years with a joint account and no prenup; wouldn’t want it any other way. Life is too short to worry about things like this and personally I would find it a sign of mistrust so it wouldn’t work in the first place.
Unless you go the trad, Islamic route and say, "Yeah, this is my domestic slave." I think that sucks even more.
You're thinking a little too hard about it, and it comes off like this nickel and diming is gonna kill a relationship more than the financial asymmetry itself. We've talked through expectations through the relationship and what happens if we break up, and we're both happy. You have so many question marks I don't know what's rhetorical or what isn't, but no, she's not gonna be homeless if we break up because she has a career.
> you are valuing her to some amount you made up (together?)
We just pay for rent and shared expenses proportionally to our income. We don't monitor it super closely, rent is always your biggest expense, so it's not a big deal if I pay for dinner once or she does.
And to say my relationship is unhealthy because of this really shows your world view. Maybe a relationship is all about money to you, but we value each other for reasons beyond that.
alternatively, life is too short to not worry about things like this, as mistakes can rob us of even this already short time we get
But anything in our personal accounts we can't see and don't monitor (I don't need to know exactly how much she spends on planners and crafts, but I know it's a lot, and she doesn't need to know exactly how much I spend on board/video games, but she knows it's a lot).
We also put money into our 401ks (I max mine out, she's getting closer to doing so) and I do additional investing on my own account, which I let her know how well it's doing every once in a while. I would love for her to do more investing besides 401k, even if just a little bit to get some understanding of how it works, but she doesn't want to have to think about it, so I handle it.
Periodically we'll have discussions on recalibrating how much to put into the joint, or some months we'll have the 'this month has more expenses than usual, we should probably go out to eat less and buy less things this month', but that's about it.
Seems to work out pretty well for us.
A large percentage of divorces are due to financial disagreements... joint accounts have proven to be a failed model at scale. If you want to share money, have separate accounts and transfer money between them as needed/on a schedule. No room for impropriety/mistrust. Everybody has autonomy.
If we choose to be realistic, rather than idealistic, we would recognize that a large percentages of marriages fail, and people should not structure their lives in such a way that the end of a relationship is catastrophic (beyond the obvious emotional burden).