How to Manage Money as a Couple

NEW YORK (Learnvest) — If you’re in a relationship – or have ever been in a relationship – you know that managing money as a twosome can be tricky.

We get questions every day about How should we divide it? Who should pay for what? So when rather controversial research came out suggesting there’s a whole new way to divide your money in a male-female couple, we perked up.

Especially since, in many traditional American households, the husband manages the investments while the wife manages daily budgeting and spending …. and that, researchers say, might be all wrong.

They make the argument that there are specific financial roles within a household that better suit a man or a woman … and they’re the ones you might least expect.

The findings
In the 2009 National Marriage Project report The State of Our Unions, Ronald T. Wilcox, faculty fellow at the National Marriage Project and professor of business administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, presents evidence that a nontraditional arrangement of a household’s finances might be best: That is, the woman invests and the man determines the day-to-day budgeting and spending.

According to Wilcox, we develop feelings of ownership over household tasks, from who empties the dishwasher to who pays the cable bill. Because of this, couples tend to settle into a routine of who-does-what without necessarily considering who might be more effective at what – and he finds that women would be more effective as the family investors for the following reasons: