How Combining Our Finances Helped Our Marriage

I'll be honest: My husband and I weren't exactly chomping at the bit to combine our finances before we got married. We were both fairly responsible—some college debt on his end, some credit card debt on mine—and we both had jobs that paid about the same amount. Despite our similar financial situations, and despite the fact that we were getting ready to spend the rest of our lives together, the idea of pooling our money seemed so scary ... so intimate. MyDaily: Ka—Ching! What Dreams About Money Really Mean

But we did it anyway. Not for ourselves, or our relationship. We did it for the government.

You see, my husband wasn't born in the United States. To start the long process toward citizenship, we had to prove to the powers-that-be that we were in love and that our love was real. Apparently that meant shared finances and pictures of us on various holidays with each others' families. It seemed like a poor way to prove devotion to another human being, but so be it.

We opened a joint checking account but kept our individual accounts. At first, we just funneled equal amounts of money into the account and used it to pay for joint expenses. It was pretty easy to do, and we were still free to spend money on our own guilty pleasures (clothes for me, video games for him) without feeling the need to explain ourselves.

Slowly, however, more money started going into the joint account, as we took more vacations together and bought more big items together. It felt good.

Then we decided to move from Chicago to New York.

We were moving because we'd both always wanted to, and because my husband is a comedian with dreams of finally quitting his day job to try doing comedy full-time. As you can probably guess, it's not the most lucrative of careers, so we discussed it long and hard and decided that I would work full-time to support us while he tackled becoming a professional comic. (Yeah, I know how it sounds.) It was a deal I made willingly after much discussion. And it meant getting rid of the individual accounts and living completely off the funds in our joint one. MyDaily: How To Have A Better Relationship With Money

The first year in New York was miserable. I didn't make nearly enough money to support us, he barely made any money as a comedian despite hustling constantly for gigs, and we spent a lot of time eating potatoes in our tiny-yet-expensive apartment, terrified of the future. We fought over who provided what and how, and who spent money more frivolously.

Eventually, realizing that fighting wouldn't pay the rent, we decided to focus instead on taking the emotional element out of our financial situation.

"It's just paper," we'd repeat to each other, over and over, like a mantra.

It is just paper. We attach self-worth, trust, security and success to money, but in the end, it's just paper, and being horrifically poor with my husband taught me that. We trusted each other enough to agree that money couldn't be a sore spot for us. So instead of letting it become a weapon we could use against each other, we banded together to fight how broke we were.