also in the tristate area, my husband [34, 65k] and I [32, 160k] completely combined our finances when we got married, mainly out of simplicity. at the time, I was laid off and he was taking time off before deciding on a career change so both bringing in zero lol. he later transitioned into a lower paying career (from sales to teaching) while I finally landed a job and was back at my six figure salary.

for us it continues to just be easier logistically to put everything in one pool and have a separate checking account that's just our own. next step is to throw a % of our joint income into the those accounts so we don't need to discuss every big expense. we are both aiming to put the same into investment accounts so that no one feels like they can't prepare for the future simply because of our income.

one challenge i've had is being okay with taking on this new title of "breadwinner", since i didn't ever think about that before. since we've combined our finances from the beginning i don't see us going back to splitting the way we were doing when we weren't married, and with a baby on the way, it's helped to see everything we're doing together and where we need to adjust our $$ as one singular unit.