Are you paying more than your spouse for house expenses?

With both life partners working nowadays, household responsibilities, including financial, are shared. Ask any couple these days and they would say that both of them pitch in 50 percent each as far as household expenses go. But, is that the right way to go about sharing the expenses? Are you sure you are actually paying equal amounts? Let’s see with an example.

Let’s say your household monthly expense is Rs 30,000 and you both contribute towards it on 50:50 basis. This means, you pitch in Rs 15,000 while your partner also puts in an equal amount. Sounds simple and fair, isn’t it?

[caption id=“attachment_553099” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Are we saying this is the only correct way of handling money by couples? Certainly not. Reuters[/caption]

But it is not. For making the contribution equitable, partners should be contributing the same percentage of their salary, not amount.

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For instance, if your partner’s salary is Rs 1,50,000 a month and he/she contributes Rs 15,000, it is actually just 10 percent of the salary towards the expense. If your salary is just Rs 60,000, contributing Rs 15,000 means 25 percent of your salary.

So, ideally, both the partners should be contributing equal percentage of their salary towards the expenses.

In the above mentioned example, ideally your partner, who earns Rs 150,000 should contribute around Rs 22,000 (around 14 percent of salary) and you around Rs 8,500 (around 14 percent of salary) . This would be the right way to contribute towards the expenses in a 50:50 ratio. Of course, this is as per our example, you will have to do your own numbers.

Of course, this would work well for those households where the couples have a common pool for expenses but maintain a separate money identity as far as investments and assets go. This also works well for live-in couples, where financial commitments are not official on paper.

Are we saying this is the only correct way of handling money by couples? Certainly not. We are simply letting you know of the various strategies used in money management. Which one to choose is entirely your call.