Who takes care of the finances in your relationship?

[Azuma_Fujin]

Most of the people on here probably have a japanese partner/husband/wife etc and i'm just wondering, who takes care of the finances in your household, is it your wife/girlfriend or your husband/boyfriend?

My japanese husband takes care of the money side of things in our house, even though he said that is not the norm. I'm wondering if anyone else is like me, or just in general what happens in your house?

 

[becki_kanou]

Everyone I've mentioned it to either Japan or the States thinks it's weird, but we both do our own finances. He does his stuff and I do mine. When we need to buy something big together we each put in half.

Maybe it is weird, but it works for us and we never have any arguments about money.

 

[Azuma_Fujin]

We were like that in the beginning, we still have our own personal bank accounts and one joint account that the earnings goes into. My husband gives me an allowance every week that i can spend on whatever i like, and he also gets one. We use this money for buying what we want or for saving, i usually use mine for christmas and birthday presents and stuff like that. All earnings go into the house money.

My family think it's weird that i get an allowance and can't believe that my husband looks after the money, and that i just can't go out and spend any of the house money on whatever i like because it's not mine to spend! I don't think it's weird Becky, in fact i'm glad to find someone similar in circumstance to myself.

 

[Grandpa Frank]

The wife wears the pants in my house.

I hate dealing with money matters. I'm glad my wife likes doing everything for household finances. She's 50% Scottish and she is tight with money, LOL.

Uncle Frank

 

[Pachipro]

In the majority of Japanese marriages, it is usually the female who handles the finances.

In our home my wife takes care of the banking, bill paying, taxes, etc. I take care of the investing and the decisions for major household purchases.

We each get a generous, agreed upon, allowance per month and both salaries are put in a joint bank account. No seperate bank accounts here as, since a marriage is a "joint venture", it all goes together. Always has and always will. Our allowances are for personal use only with no questions asked. Clothes, gas, cigarettes and major individual purchases, like a camera or laptop, come from the joint account.

If, for any reason we should split up in the future, it is agreed, in writing, that all assets are to be split 50-50 as we both make similar salaries and started out with nothing when we married 23 years ago.

It works for us.

 

[Azuma_Fujin]

Pachipro, nice to hear from you and to see another different experience.

I have never encountered the "getting an allowance" thing in Australian culture so when my husband started doing that for us, i thought it was kind of weird. But i really like the idea, as it stops me from just going out willy-nilly spending money like my aussie friends when we can't afford it, i know my weekly limit and i stick to it.

If i need health or personal items, clothing, or medical or stuff like that, it's all covered by our earnings not my allowance. So all in all it's a pretty good deal.

It's a good idea to have a pre-nup. We don't have one. In fact when i got married i was $50,000 rich from a recently inherited lump sum of an uncle who passed away. I used it to buy a decent car (my husband's old one was a bomb), and our first trip to japan together, and some furnishings for our first house together, etc etc, but i don't expect to get it back if we divorce because i wanted to help as i was a student at the time and my husband supported me financially so i believe everything is and was fair.

I don't ever think about us divorcing, we have had tough times in the past were we fought alot but we got through it by communicating. I hope it never happens to you either!

 

[Mikawa Ossan]

Pachipro's situation is pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I got married. Reality turned out to be different, however.

We kept everything seperate. Which meant that I paid for everything. Even though we made roughly the same. Oh, wait, I think she paid for gas once.

Luckily since everything was separate, money was not an issue when we did get divorced. She kept all her money, and I kept all of mine or what was left of it, anyway.

 

[Tsuyoiko]

All our money goes into a joint current account, out of which all bills are paid by direct debit.

I have no interest in handling money, so my husband keeps track. At the beginning of each month he estimates how much we will need to leave in the current account, and the rest goes into savings accounts. We have ISAs that don't get touched and an instant access account with a few hundred in it in case of emergency.

Neither of us has an allowance as such as we don't really spend anything beyond the necessities. If I need anything like phone credit I just buy it, but for anything costing more than a few quid I will check with him first, because I trust his judgment about whether we can afford it.

 

[Kinsao]

I don't have a Japanese partner, so I don't know if it's relevant to the discussion, but I control the household finances. Not only is it a matter of our personal preferences, but it works best in the practical sense too, because (a) I'm the primary earner, and (b) my partner does a lot of financial stuff in other contexts so it's good for him to get a break from it.

We wanted to have a joint account but there are certain complications which mean we can't yet. However, as my partner isn't earning a personal wage/income at the moment and is not in receipt of benefits either, any amount coming into his own account is minimal. I operate my own accounts in exactly the same way I would do if they were joint, though. I have one account where my wages come into, and the bills are all paid out of that, and I calculate how much is needed to leave in there and the rest I move into another account that we can use for 'day to day' stuff like food, petrol, and other necessary spending.

 

[misa.j]

Mine is similar to Tsuyoiko's house. Both of our paychecks are directly deposited into our joint account, which most of the bills are paid from automatically. My husband writes checks for things like car insurance, taxes, water bill etc. because it's just easier for him to do it than me doing it. I never had to write checks when I was in Japan.

My parents in Japan had separate accounts, though. They seemed to have different purposes; big purchases were made using my father's account and the tuition for kids came from my mother's.

And, one thing I know my mother had her secret place to hide her little cash in the closet! I was watching her... hehehe!

 

[kristine08m]

Here in the Philippines hold the finances both girl and boy...