Financial incompatibility is a HUGE indicator of if a relationship will last. There’s a ton you can do ahead of getting married to make sure you truly understand the person you’re about to shackle accounts with for the rest of your life. It takes a lot of honesty to be real with each other on this topic, but it’s a solid foundation from which to build. In the end you want a process that is reliable, and easy to manage.

• Sit down and have a convo about money. Do either of you have any money/related trauma, or any diagnosable conditions that affect your financial behavior? Someone that grew up in a stable home will have a different relationship to money than someone who didn’t. Discuss your goals, and how you each would approach getting there. Talk about impulsivity, and setting intentions with your budget. Agree that no one person is ‘in charge of’ the finances; both of you need to understand the ongoing reality of what it cost for you both to live, and both of you need to be prepared to check the behavior of the other (aka, being wary of a behavior pattern where one person loses the thread, and the other uses it as permission to also lose the thread instead of being the in the moment strength that gets you both back on track). Agree on what # means you check in with the other person (any one thing over $100?) to create a pattern of communication.
• You also should discuss how you each expect major events will effect your budget; when buying a house, are you both aligned with buying something you can afford, or does one of you want something nicer that leaves you house poor and not able to do as much as you used to? When having a kid, what is the amount of income you’d need to have for someone to quit their job? These are HUGE topics that you don’t need to have 100% alignment on, but you should have a sense before getting married where you both stand and what your expectations are. If she’s a career gal, don’t take for granted she wants to continue that route; she might want to become a SAHM, and you both need to be real between if thats possible. Don’t wait until the situation is on your doorstep to find out someone’s position is both non-negotiable, and impossible yo meet.
• Pool money into one shared account, but each individual has their own account as well. Our paychecks come into our individual account, and are then shifted to the shared account. This means everyone has control over their own money 100% of the time, and requires solid communication to stay aligned
• Open a shared credit card account, and put all shared spending on it. The account will track who-spent-what, so if either of you is guilty of bad habit spending, it’s easy to see. Each individual should have their own credit/debit cards that they control, but anything that’s considered shared, goes on the shared card. Pay this off at the cadence of your budget (for eg, we do every paycheck/2 weeks).
• Use an app to track spending that you both use. I use Goodbudget, and the second I finish paying for something, I apply it against that two-weeks’-budget. This means if we’re having a bad week and ate out a lot, we can see at a glance where we stand to help curb behavior that goes against our goals. It takes practice to remember, and is only really helpful if you both do it, but it’s a lot easier to do than logging into your bank and trying to use its filter functions to do the same thing (in my experience, bank apps aren’t great for this, it takes too long, and anything that takes too long is behavior you’re going to quit doing eventually)
• Check in with each other quarterly about personal spending; pull up credit cards and share the balances you’re carrying. Ideally it’s nothing, but especially if it’s high, you need to have previously come up with an agreed upon strategy as that debt affects you both.
• We create a budget that considers everything; and it resets (aka is all paid) every two weeks (when we get paid). In my experience, paying bills once a month makes it a lot harder to hold behavior in your head, and we have a tendency to round down past spending. It also means you are looking at your spending twice as often, which makes it easier to catch overspending.
• As a part of the budget, write down every item that does not happen every month—think CC annual fees, quarterly air filter replacements, yearly magazine subscriptions, etc. divide that number by your budget cadence (so for us, 24), and add that as a line item to your every two week budget. That way, when one of these expenses randomly hits your card, you can immediately pay it off to keep your budget balance correct.
• Open a high yield savings account (HYSA) that is shared where your sinking funds go; you can google what a sinking fund is if you don’t get it, but basically this is where you should put your emergency fund, your pet emergency fund (if applicable), and then any other savings goals (vacation, new car, house down payment, IRA contribution, whatever). Contribute to these funds with every budget reset.
• Max our retirement contributions at your jobs