SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Great post! I have always felt it's most healthy for married couples to share finances. It's best to consider finances as "our money," instead of "your money" or "their money." My wife and I have always shared - but we got married young (at 21), and it never occurred to us not to share.

I'm saying this as someone who has always made at least twice as much as my wife, since she was a teacher for 30 years until she retired. I always viewed us as a unit - "two becoming one flesh." However, neither of us has been "overly" foolish with money, and we had the same financial goals. If one of us had issues with foolishly spending money, we may have considered splitting finances - but we never ran into this.

My daughter recently got married at 27, a little later in life than we did. It took her and her husband about a year before they combined finances. They have an interesting dynamic in that she makes more than he does (she's an actuary, he's a chemical engineer), but he's better at saving than she is. She really likes to travel to see her friends all over the country. But they're working through it.

When I went through marriage counseling at our church 35 years ago, my pastor told me the two most important things to a marriage were finances and making my wife feel safe. I have always taken this to heart. There has never been "financial infidelity" in our marriage from either of us.

Bigger, you need to teach courses in common sense.
My husband is a car nut. I will not disclose the number of cars and other vehicles we have owned but one time I caught him drooling over a one of a kind which he was going to buy. I felt the earth move and not in a good way. I asked him to think about it over night. The next day he said he was not going to buy it. This is when desire bows to common sense. He said he would have gotten so much joy out of it for a couple of days and spent the rest of his life regretting blowing through that much money.
As a social worker I found that money was often part of conversations with parents who chose to spend a couple of thousand dollars on entertainment systems, devices, you name it, but begged for money for food to feed their children.
In the US we have govt health insurance for many children and disabled adults. I have a job that provides our private ins so I have left it to my husband to manage our business but my name is on it.
I nearly lost it when I read how much Americans are in debt to credit cars, car payments, mortgages, loans etc. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says we need food, clothing and shelter. We also need love, nurturing love, dependable love. We do not need the latest cell(mobile to you Brits).
A foster mother I work with teaches her foster children from Monopoly money. They need info about how much tax is taken out of their salaries. Gas(petrol), rent, food, fun, all take money. None of them have a clue yet they are told goodbye when they become 18. Yes, this needs to be taught in school.
So Bigger, none of us talk about money. We can discuss everything else but never that and it can have tragic endings. Recently, here in the US a father killed his family and himself over the amount of debt he was in. When I was young conversations were about family. With the info in that little square in our hands we see EVERY SINGLE DAY someone has a good life because of money and shame when they lose it…and we want what they have.