- Life insurance (where your partner is the beneficiary)
- Disability insurance
- Health insurance
This is a sponsored post.
Credit: Ketut Subiyanto via Pexels
Money can be a major source of conflict for couples, but it doesn’t have to be. When you take the right steps to manage your money together, you can make sure that financial matters are never a sore subject at home. What steps can you take?
Budget Together
When you’re sharing expenses with another person, it doesn’t make much sense to follow two personal budgets. You should build a household budget together and follow it to the best of your abilities. You can do this with the help of a budgeting app designed for couples, like HoneyDue or Goodbudget.
Get a Joint Account
Open up a joint bank account to cover all of your joint expenses. By setting up a joint account, you will both have equal access to the funds when you run important errands, like getting groceries for the week. You can also automate bill payments through the joint account so that no one feels solely burdened by that responsibility.
Keep Individual Accounts
While you should open up a joint account for joint expenses, you should keep an individual bank account for individual expenses, like gym memberships, clothing and hobbies. This can help you avoid conflict over personal spending and saving.
Individual bank accounts can also protect you from suffering from financial abuse (sometimes called economic abuse). How? If you pool all of your income into a joint account, all of your income is accessible to the other user (your partner). If they decide to empty the account, they can do so, even if that leaves you with no money for the rest of the month. This isn’t theft or fraud. They are legally entitled to use that money as they please without facing consequences from the bank.
While you trust and care for your partner, you should avoid situations where they will have control over all of your earnings. Having at least one separate bank account will allow you to maintain a degree of financial independence and security in a shared household.
Build Financial Safety Nets
So, you will want to create some financial stability as a couple. One way to do that is to have an emergency fund. Ideally, an emergency fund should have 3 to 6 months’ worth of household expenses inside of it. This amount can help you cover urgent, unplanned expenses (like household repairs) immediately. It can also provide financial support if either of you lose a major source of income (like becoming suddenly unemployed).
The Trick with Emergency Funds
You should build the emergency fund in a joint account because you’ll both want to be able to access the savings right away. You don’t want just one person to have access to this safety net. For instance, the house gets a plumbing problem when your partner is away on a work trip, and they’re the only one who has access to the emergency fund. In that case, you might have enough savings to pay a plumber to fix the problem, but you have no way of accessing that money until your partner sends a transfer or gets back home.
In the case that you don’t have emergency savings, you can turn to a personal loan as a backup plan. Go to a website like CreditFresh to see whether you’re eligible for a personal loan there. If you are, you can quickly fill out and submit a loan application in hopes of getting temporary funds to cover your urgent expense. If you get approved, you’ll be able to respond to your emergency and put it behind you, even without any savings on hand.
Getting Insured
You will also want to sign up for insurance policies that can help you and your partner recover from major financial setbacks, like if you fall ill and can’t work for a long period of time. In addition to your homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance, you should sign up for these policies for the sake of your financial stability:
This is a sponsored post.
This is a sponsored post.
