Combining Your Finances

I read Gail Vaz Oxlade's Blog and in the 'Have your say' section. Someone replied to someone elses' question regarding combineing your finances once you're married. It was a great post! so full of Love!

So credit for this post goes to:
Name: Maureen
From: Whitehorse, Yukon Territory

Link: http://gailvazoxlade.com/gbook/gbook.php

Post:

This is for Danny Jellis to answer his question.It is funny that you should ask what we married folk think because I just finished having a discussion on this very subject with some young friends of ours. The young couple asked otherwise I would never have given them my opinion. Yeah right. My husband tried to warn them. He said to the boy “Quick, lie down and play dead” but the girl really wanted to know.

I don’t know what the other married ones think but I know what I think.

We have been married for 32 years, 4 months and 22 days – but who’s counting? Before that we lived together for 3 years and that was in a time when living together and getting pregnant out of wedlock was not widely accepted. We are still together because both of us can still hardly wait to share our day with the other one. If either of us felt differently we would not still be together. But that would be okay too. In our vows we changed ‘til death doth us part to ‘til love doth us part. We were lucky in that we never happened to fall out of love with each other at the same time.

I was never one of those girlie girls who wanted to get married but from the first moment I saw my husband I knew that he was the one. He proposed to me 10 minutes into our first date and every week for the next 3½ years until I finally broke down and gave in.

We never needed that marriage certificate (other than to get a mortgage) because we both knew it was for keeps. We knew this because we loved each other, liked each other, could make each other laugh until we peed and we wanted to share everything. I wanted to take care of him and he wanted to take care of me. We have grown and changed over the years but I would still give him a kidney and he would still jump in front of a stampeding cow in order to push me out of harms way. Hopefully next time it won’t be into a ditch full of water and cow p***.

If you don’t want to share everything what is the point? You should just be ships that pass in the bar or friends with benefits.

With every day that passes we share a past. From dawn to dusk even if we aren’t together we share the present and every night we go to sleep knowing that we are going to share tomorrow. God willing and if the creek don’t rise.

When you share your time, your thoughts, your dreams, your bodies, your DNA, your wacked out crazy family dinners, a dozen glasses of wine, a box of cookies and only one sink in the bathroom sharing the money is nothing. Just part of normal. And who earns what, spends what, has what and gets what is unimportant because you are one and working towards the goal of taking care of your family and making each other happy. In our case the first two and a half decades we were also working hard towards the goal of acquiring debt but the last years we have been working towards getting rid of it. And that has been one of the best ways of making each other happy.

From the first day we started living together we have always combined all of OUR income because it is OUR life. I have never earned as much money as he has but my work at home and outside is every bit as valuable as his even though it didn’t have the same dollar value. Money makes the world go around but it doesn’t keep you warm at night and take the kids to the park so you can have a nap. When he was unemployed or back in school I was the bread winner but I was earning OUR money. We have always paid OUR bills with OUR money. And yet we have also always had our own money too– we call it our allowance – for which we are accountable to no one. Makes us independent while still staying joined at the bank account. To us this just makes sense and makes OUR life so simple.