As a single woman, I never really worried about my money. I knew what I spent and how it was being spent. If I went short or didn’t write a
deposit or withdrawal down, it was all my fault.
I never really thought about sharing my money until about two years ago when I married my husband, Scott.
Merging our money was very hard for me to do. I had this idea that my money was my money and his money was our money. Bad, I know but that’s the way I looked at it at when we first decided to open a joint checking and saving account.
I didn’t really know how he handled his money, so it was a bit scary to me. Yes, we had talked about money and how we wanted to go about handling it but I was still scared.
I think that main thing that scared me the most was loosing control of my funds. Somewhere in my head I thought that I would no longer be able to spend the way I wanted to spend the money that I had earned — or worse, he would spend it all and leave me nothing at all.
Ha, can you tell by now that I have some really issues with losing money? Well, I do!
But what I realized was that my hubby wasn’t going to run away with all of our hard earned money. And he also wasn’t going to push me into a joint account if that wasn’t something that I wasn’t sure that I wanted.
I understood then that merging our money was a choice we were choosing to make. I was not being forced into it — and that if I saw fit, we could change our arrangement at any time.
This gave me peace of mind and a bit of my single girl power back which I didn’t realize was so important to me.
So I guess I tell you all this because marriage and the merging of money, if you see fit to do so, is a process. A process in which each person has to be comfortable with the changes. If someone isn’t comfortable with the terms, talk about it and then change it if need be.
Natalie is a recently married 30 something blogger who is trying to make sense of her financial life as a newlywed. She recently began blogging at Broke Newlyweds. You can connect with her on Twitter @brokenewlyweds and Broke Newlyweds on Facebook.
Andrea is the Chief Chick of Smart Money Chicks. After filing BK twice (once because she panicked, second time because the pro messed the first time up), she realized that it all could have been avoided if she understood more about how her Finances worked and the options available. At that point, she wanted to help as many as she could never make the same mistakes again. Our Promise is that all the content you read on here is created or edited by Andrea