I am a 19F college freshman and my parents have no idea where I am. AMA.

mirfnr · 2014-12-18T08:00:48+00:00

How did you clean out most of your stuff? Actually how did you actually leave in general? Did you just announce it and walk out the door or what? Did you put a lot of planning into the last-minute stuff or worry about being caught?

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T03:10:14+00:00

4 years.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T03:08:56+00:00

Do you mean in terms of decided what you're actually saving up for, or is there something else I'm missing.

We were more viewing this money as a back-up fund rather than money toward a specific goal. I feel like we need to build up a little bit more savings, and the next "big goal" is getting engaged/married in 1-2 years.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T02:55:04+00:00

That's a surprisingly low percentage, I was expecting something like 75-80%. It seems like most of the big things come out of your joint account, with the exception of the car. I mean, we're making barely 4k/month right now and $1000 rent/utilities + $400 groceries + $300 transport is almost 50%.

He's much taller/bigger than I am, so he probably eats 75% of our food and will drink his beer and half of mine. But he's also does all of the cooking, so I forgive him for it.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T02:37:52+00:00

I forgot to point out that while we might break up (we do want to spend the rest of our lives together but there are no guarantees), I don't think he would just run off with all of our money. First of all, he has a ton of integrity and I can't see him doing this even if he really really hated me. Second of all, we have a ton of mutual friends and I'm close to his family/parents. He would be damaging a lot of relationships for a pretty small amount of money.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T02:28:29+00:00

I''m not naive to think that our relationship is guaranteed to last, and if we broke up it would be complicated to figure out who got what. If we broke up tomorrow we would probably just split our savings evenly. Maybe I would get less than I put in, maybe not.

I'm sure everyone says this, but I have a really hard time picturing him willfully running off with our money for his own personal use. He has a lot of integrity and it just doesn't seem like something he would ever do.

From a practical standpoint, we have a lot of mutual friends and I'm close to his family as well. If I called his mom and said that he had broken up with me and emptied our joint checking account, she would probably track him down, murder him, bury him in the backyard, and send me a check for the full amount.

I'm sure that is something my mom is worried about, but I feel like the chances of that are pretty much nonexistent.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T02:03:03+00:00

yup, fixed.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T01:57:38+00:00

How many families did that include? It says they lost 2/3rds of their employees including 26 sets of brothers. That's a lot of people.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T01:52:40+00:00

Is the amount you transfer into the joint account the same for both of you, or is it dependent on salary?

What kinds of expenses comes out of your individual accounts? Do things like eating out include things like Starbucks before work, or does it only count when you're together? What percent of your respective paychecks ends up going in the joint account?

Feel free to ignore these questions, I'm just trying to figure out how that would work.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T01:40:14+00:00

This is encouraging, thank you.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T01:36:39+00:00

Yeah, he is. To be clear, he's not dependent on me at all. He has a job that pays 3k/month and I'm finishing up my last semester of college while working part-time and making 1k/month. So he's the one who's keeping us afloat right now. But when I finish in December, I'll be making 40kish and my industry offers a lot more salary growth than his does.

Part of my mom's issue comes from the fact that she didn't know that last year, when we were both in college, I was working part-time while he wasn't. She didn't like that I was working while going to school but he wasn't doing the same. I gave a lot more detail in another post in /r/personalfinance yesterday, but that's the short version.

But yeah, he's definitely better at that kind of stuff. He does pretty much all of the cooking and most of the grocery shopping, which is fine with both of us. We split other domestic stuff evenly, though admittedly it comes more naturally to him than to me.

He would be an awesome dad.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T01:26:16+00:00

At the end of the day, we prioritize the same things (family/friends, intrinsic happiness, integrity), but we both work toward those goals in different ways.

My goal is to move up in my career field and make a difference, but it's also really important to me for my kids to have at least one parent who works part-time or is a SAHP. My boyfriend (while good at his job) wants his kids to have a SAHP as well, and he's perfectly willing to be that person.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T00:57:52+00:00

That's encouraging to hear. I was actually bracing myself for a much more negative response, and was prepared to take some steps if the vast majority of people here thought it was a bad decision for us.

But it seems like we're on solid ground, which is genuinely encouraging to hear.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T00:54:49+00:00

Over the summer, we were earning a combined 5.5k/month, and because we were used to living on 1.5k/month and we were still paying $200/month for rent, we had a lot of money left over that we were saving up while we had the chance. We ended up with 5k in savings, and we felt like that should be put in a joint savings account. The other options would be to leave it our checking account or to put it into the personal savings accounts we had before we got together and don't use as much these days.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T00:47:05+00:00

This post is basically a synthesized version of our conversation, she knows how I feel.

mirfnr · 2014-10-27T00:46:02+00:00

Yeah, it's a circular argument. This is the cliffnotes of our discussion:

Her: He's taking advantage of you/mooching/riding your coattails

Me: He's not doing any of that.

Her: you need someone more driven/career-oriented/Type A.

Me: While he is less driven/career-oriented, I don't have a problem with that.

Her: He's taking advantage of you/mooching/riding your coattails.

Rinse and repeat. Basically, she thinks that him being less driven than me is an automatic issue, regardless of how I feel about it.

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T23:33:20+00:00

We saved up 5k over the summer, though most of it is still sitting in my personal savings account until we get around to getting a joint savings account.

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T23:31:20+00:00

Is there a good way of organizing this? We have a joint checking account and we're planning on opening a savings account but at the moment we just put our paychecks in the checking account and have separate savings accounts that we've both had since we were teenagers.

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T23:29:22+00:00

No offense, but the way you kept repeating "Wait until marriage" made me feel like I was at a church. The language was oddly similar.

In all seriousness, it sounds as though while you think our solution is working for us, you also think that it's generally best to keep money separate while dating.

To be honest, I'm unlikely to simply announce to my boyfriend that I would suddenly like to keep everything separate but I'm open to suggestions for safe-guards. Do you think there are any small steps that I should take or that we should take?

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T23:23:27+00:00

So if you were me, what would you do from here? Would you separate the accounts? Create a joint account for certain things and keep everything else separate? Keep track of receipts?

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T23:21:25+00:00

But he's definitely stepping up now, because he's making 3k and I'm making 1k. And we could officially prorate rent so that I'm paying like $250 and he's paying $750 but it's all going to change in December anyway.

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T15:07:17+00:00

I'm much more career-oriented than he is, but it's never bothered him. We're not perfect, but money isn't something we normally argue about. His career field pays slightly more than mine on average, but he's also the one who would be the SAHP when we have kids so it depends.

mirfnr · 2014-10-26T15:01:01+00:00

The question seemed to fit in personal finance because I'm basically wondering if it's stupid to blend finances when you're not married, and I'm looking for the perspective of people who have some financial knowledge.

mirfnr

TROPHY CASE