For a while, I earned more than my wife by about 3:1. Then she outearned me about 3.5:1 when I went back to school for a professional degree. Now we both make a lot more money and I outearn her by about 2.5:1. We’re both crummy with money, don’t communicate about it well, both fiercely independent and sort of like it that way. So we divvied up household expenses more or less proportionately, pay into a couple common pots (savings & college fund) and when one of us needs help with the bills on a given month asks the other. We also coordinate pretty well on the long term financial planning, sync up our major long term finances (e.g. home improvement costs) but still maintain a lot of independence. One or the other of us has always had the lion’s share of the bills, and the basic rule is we share proportionally to our income on household expenses, but each is on their own if they want to screw up their personal finances with a credit card. (You’re never on your own once you’ve co-signed, but I have come to trust her on that issue, and she, me).
It’s not a perfect or permanent or one-size-fits-all solution, it’s just a negotiated settlement we reached after trying every other idea that didn’t work for *us* including the common-pot approach, which was disastrous since each felt the other was micromanaging. At times we’ve paid very close attention to our slender income stream and have sync’ed it up closely but for the most part we try to preserve distance. It’s not perfect but neither are we, and this approach seems to work okay for us, and has particularly worked well over the last 4-5 years; we *never* fight about money.
BTW, two-toed sloths aren’t endangered. Fact checkers, apparently, are.
