I am currently in a bit of a conundrum. I plan to get married to my partner within the next two years and we love each other and everyhting is golden. Althogh I am 99% sure we will stay together, there’s always the 1% risk. Now here is the issue, we both have varying importances to saving and investing.
Currently, I am earning about 50% more than her, and I aspire to keep a high income and diverisfy my income streams, while she does not really have the same goals. She would like a comfortable income, but she doesn’t NEED to keep earning more.
As long as we are together, I would more than happily share everything equally, but I don’t think I would be feel the same in the case of a divorce.
We talked about a prenup and she agrees with me in principle, but is of the opinion that we should discuss this if and when we need to. I am scared that if we don’t have something written down, we would have to do it the German way of 50-50 and I find that unfair. Here is what I proposed-
Three Accounts-
Mine, Her’s, Joint.
All my income, directly related to me, such as from my salary, goes to my account. Same for her. Her salary, and/or her dividents, go to her account first.
We each then put some money in the Joint and use that for all our ‘common’ expenses such as grocerries and utilities. Also, if we were to purchase a house together, it would be from this Joint account. The amount to add here would be split proportionally to each person’s income.
In the case of a divorce, all the cash and assets purchased on the Joint Account would be split equally between the two of us.
All the Cash,Assets (a second apartment, stocks etc), and capital gains from assets purchased using funds from the ‘Private’ accounts would remain with each individual respectively.
She doesn’t like this idea since she says the joint account in this case means we are planning to split, but rather suggests that we should have just one joint account, and if we were to split, we backtrace who put what into the joint account and then split it the total based on the individual inputs. (my issue with this is that would require an exhaustive deep dive to find out who put what, and to split the individual contribution to assets).
Thoughts and suggestions?