What if you want your partner to take care of your finances? Or if they want to take care of yours?

When you share finances with a partner, you can outsource the budgeting to the one who is most interested, but there are good reasons not to.

After doing this for many years, I’ve learned a surprising fact: not everyone is a money nerd.

Who knew? It seems crazy to me, but some people don’t enjoy spreadsheets and expense tracking and thinking about mutual funds. Wild, I know.

You may be one of these people. Or, you may be in a relationship with this person.

Not everyone who is in a relationship needs to share finances. (Also, there are multiple ways to share finances when you’re in a relationship.) But if you do, you may be tempted to let the nerdiest one of the bunch take over the duties of the budgeting and planning.

And why not? Let the person who likes it the most take care of it! Sounds like a sure deal.

But before you go outsourcing your finances to a partner, or before you take over the budgeting duties of someone else, you may want to reconsider.

Plan together, work together

Your money is just a tool for getting what you want, whether it’s things or experiences.

So why would you want to outsource that tool to someone else, no matter how aligned you are?

Giving up any semblance of hands-on interest in your household budget means that you relinquish a very powerful planning ability. Another person can dictate what’s important and what’s not.

But more than that, working together on financial matters can, if done in the best possible frame of mind, be a bonding and growth experience. You plan together, work together, and move together, as a unit.

(Sure, there can also money fights that come from this. But that’s not a reason to have one of you tune out. Money fights are an important indicator of conflicting needs, and it’s vital to work through them in a relationship. Talk to me if you’re experiencing this kind of difficulty.)

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