<prompt> Human: My fiance 24yo male and I 24yo female are getting married in a few months! We plan to merge finances and conduct most spending out of a joint account, but are also intrigued by the concept of individual allowances that we can each freely spend as we wish. One challenge of that seems to be deciding what counts as a joint transaction versus allowance spending haircuts? lunch with coworkers? girls weekend trip?Any examples of how you do merged finances, and if you allocate allowances, how do you decide what counts as joint vs. individual spending?  <response>: I see a lot of the same type of generic borderline useless response here, but Id say it totally depends on your financial situation, as to what is an acceptable allowance and what are significant purchases you need to discuss. And you really cant mess with what motivates people. The bottom line is youve got to agree on it and be realistic. You might want to save for renovations or a new home or something truly substantial, but your fiancé might be working everyday to get a new bike or some other decently large thing and enjoy his life today. Not that Im saying spend everything like a dummy. I had this discussion with my wife when we first merged accounts, we both were and still are fans of saving and investing, and both do a lot to avoid wasting money. But when we were just married, she wanted to save virtually everything we made, minus her frequent but small expensespurchases, and some similar amount for me. I wanted to occasionally buy big things a bit more than her budget, as well as save for renovating our house. And she was pretty mad about it. But fundamentally the desire to renovate our entire house as fast as possible was not that pressing to me as it was to her. I also had to tell her that it was not motivational for me to think about working a year or two and not really doing anything Id like to do outside of work, all in order to afford a new kitchen, layout, bathrooms etc. Also that she was basically trying to unilaterally set a budget based off her habits. Its worth pointing out that I had the same spending behavior before we were married.Youre going to have a lot of discussion over this even if you have the same spendingsaving philosophies in general. Itll also be complicated further, if you have dissimilar incomeswages, this is a big one that people dont realize until theyre going over who holds the purse strings. Throw in another level if youre household has a large income. I think a lot of people underestimate how hard it can be to merge finances. Its not like everyone can just say we each get 100 a month, even if you think youre both frugal. 