Jordan and I are at a point where things are humming along really nicely. We have our joint savings account for our house fund – which we each contribute $150/bi-weekly too and we have our joint chequing account for rent and the household utilities. We also hold roommates damage deposits in this account. We each contribute $287.50/bi-weekly – which covers our share of rent/bills.
On to the variables – Jordan and I each contribute $100/bi-weekly to our ‘food jar’ so the division of grocery/personal care/cleaning supplies is split evenly.
There ends our ‘joint’ financial endeavors. We usually split costs of eating out or other entertainment, but it’s not clearly defined – and that works for us right now. When it comes to large purchases – we usually talk about them first, but at the end of the day we each still have our own pots of money.
Now, here comes my question.
April is salary review time each year at my company – and I’m likely going to get a raise of 2% (not significant enough to change things) however; I may get a boost from $47,000 to $51,000….That’s pretty huge. That’s close to 6.5% - which is significant.
I think that if my income gets that big of a boost – I should put more into the ‘pot’. I figure – a gross increase of $4,000 will net me about $107/bi-weekly.
Right now – Jordan is very aggressively paying off his truck and thus his discretionary income is not very flexible. If I put more into joint he would have more flexibility in his budget.
I’m wondering what you do in your relationships – and what you think is fair? I was thinking maybe I would contribute $50 more to groceries (and Jordan would keep $50) or maybe it would be easier to adjust our joint account contributions to say $260 biweekly for jordan and $315 for me? or Does it makes sense to just leave things alone - we've been together for two years now.
To help give some context, I’ll share an average snapshot of my bi-weekly budgets and Jordan's. I have two of Jordan's below - so you can see what the month looks like. We've gone a long way to find some balance between each pay period - but they are still lop sided. You can see one week he has about $55 for un-budgeted expenses and the next he has about $175.
Olie is the lunch truck that comes to his place of work every day and Telus is his cell phone bill. We're getting better at making lunches - but realistically there will usually be a cost to this.
Here's my next bi-weekly budget (though you've seen a lot of these):
Of course things like horse board, car insurance, the gym and our cell phone bills only happen once a month - this is reflective of what we have left over on any given pay period. You can see that my car insurance costs more then Jordan's but my cell phone bill is cheaper then his. There are also some expenses that are different. Jordan has a gym membership ($54/month) and I have a horse ($165/month).
So that was the current picture....if I get a raise - and have an extra $108/biweekly - how much do you figure is reasonable to chip into our joint pot and how much should I keep to funnel into savings and debt repayment?
