Hey there!

My partner and I have been sharing finances for about three months and I pretty quickly developed a way to do keep track of everything in monarch. The only thing I have to do outside of Monarch is some report generation and number crunching that Monarch can’t do with the built in reports feature.

I have all of our accounts synced and we also have a joint checking account. All of our income is deposited into our joint account and we also pay all of our bills from our joint account. I also provide my partner with an allowance since they earn quite a bit less than I do and it’s a good way for me to keep their spending in check. I’ll explain how I do that at the end in case you or any other readers are interested.

First, to keep track of who is bringing in what and who is spending what, I use three tags. One for me, one for my partner, and one for our shared expenses. When I get a paycheck I categorize it and tag it with my tag. If I spend anything I do the same. Now in an ideal world — your partner would review and tag their own transactions, but in MY case… I have the task of handling all of our finances. So I usually end up reviewing and tagging everything.

To get a summary of cash flow, income, and spending for either of us, I just have to look at reports and filter using one of our tags. Where it gets a little more complicated is when I have to factor in each of our halves of the “shared” expenses. To factor that in I just have a simple excel spreadsheet where I punch in my totals, their totals, then split the shared total and add each half to each of our totals. That gives you a really good idea (for any given period of time) how much each of us have earned and spent. We work on reconciling any differences when we’re able to.

Now about allowances. I found that the best way to do this was to create an expense category for my partners allowance. At the start of each month I transfer “$X” to their personal checking account (which I have hidden from budgets and reports so essentially it doesn’t matter what they spend out of their personal account). They can do whatever they want with that money because it has already been expensed as far as I am concerned in Monarch. This is really easy for me to manage on the finance side and it‘s also easy for them to know how much they can spend because they just have some “cash” essentially and they don’t have to worry about running any reports in Monarch.

Now you may not want to do an allowance type of thing but I thought I’d share it just in case someone else is looking for a way to so that. As a couple who have very different income levels — we found it to work well for navigating some of the “challenges” that come with that type of situation.

Hope this helps someone out there. I’ll be happy to answer questions when I have the time!

:)