tangent87

As I mentioned above, we could not agree on how to use the savings.

We do have pretty different incomes and working hours. Wealth is absolutelly a shared affair, but we could not get to agree on how to invest the savings. We have pretty different risk tolerance and asset class affinity, so we decided to split proportionally and grant each other freedom with whatever is not necessary for the family needs. Most likely we'll re-evalute the criteria in the future if absolute value of our savings diverge too much or if our investing choices will have markedly different ROIs.

Me and my wife kind of do this. More specifically we contribute to family expenses proportionally to our income and we pay all family expenses from a shared bank account (fed with monthly contributions). Any personal expense is paid by our personal account. This guarantees that we do have the same saving rate and this feels to me much more fair that a 50/50 split.

I use GnuCash to track all of my family accounts. I feel better not letting any third party have my financial data and it served me as a forcing function to learn about accounting. I does take less than 20 minutes each months to cleanup and import transactions from my accounts, without any automation and with some checking for data correctness. I don't mind the lack of automation (yet), I set aside time to go through expense classification and to look at the past months. Reports are kind of dry but helpful. The pain point is that they are not easily shareable