Dave Ramsey Weighs In on Whether After a Decade It’s Time for This Couple to Combine Their Finances

Should married couples combine finances? A caller to the Dave Ramsey show is grappling with this issue.

The wife called in to speak to Ramsey because she and her husband had been married for a decade but had not merged their money. Now that she had lost her job, she wanted to join together with her husband and have a shared financial life — but she was still worried about the fact she was the more responsible spender.

Ramsey had some blunt advice for her, as he provided her with some important reasons for couples to combine finances as well as some tips on how to do it the right away. 

When should a couple combine their finances?

Ramsey made clear that he believes married couples should virtually always combine their finances. He explained to the caller that she and her husband were “following a formula that has a very low statistical probability of winning with wealth building and of having a high-quality marriage,” by keeping their money separate. He said that when Ramsey Solutions conducted a study of millionaires, all the married millionaires had joint finances — and that the wedding vows implied that a couple should become one, including financially. 

There are plenty of good reasons why that’s the case, and Ramsey pointed many of them out. Specifically, when a couple does have shared finances, they work together to achieve joint financial goals. They have someone to hold them accountable for their spending, and they can team up with a combined effort to grow wealth. This can be a far better way to achieve success than when each person tries to manage things on their own. 

How to combine finances the correct way

While married couples tend to do better when they have a shared financial life, the caller to the Ramsey Show was concerned because she said that she was the more responsible one in the marriage. Although she had lost her job and now wanted to share finances with her husband, she admitted that they had tried this approach in the past and it had not been successful. She was upset with her husband’s spending habits, and she said both parties agreed that she was better with money. 

She also felt she had set herself up to be in a good position financially over the years, while her husband hadn’t necessarily done so, and she didn’t know if she could get him on the same page now if they combined their funds.

Ramsey had some pretty strong words for her when she said this, though, as he explained that she isn’t her husband’s mother and she can’t make him manage money the way she wants. Instead, he suggested that the couple work together to create a financial agreement or contract. It couldn’t be her imposing her will, but they had to come together, make a budget with both of their inputs and define some shared financial objectives. Once they have this agreement, her husband must be willing to stick to the “contract” they create. 

This is good advice for any couple. One spouse can’t make the other do anything and shouldn’t try — but both should be willing to work together to find money solutions they can live with. A financial advisor can help couples set these goals, but the important thing is that they both are on board and want to work on them together and are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to do it. 

The caller and her husband can hopefully succeed in that, and anyone else who is married and struggling with joint financial management may also want to take Ramsey’s advice and create this contractual framework so both couples have input and motivation to make their goals a reality. 

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