Mate, seriously. You want some advice? I got some advice. The 95% vs 5% in this thread is that in 95% of it you sound like an asshole (the 5% where you don’t is the rabbit). I’ll agree with you that you can’t get a proper picture of a whole relationship in a few posts, and I’m in no way saying you necessarily are an asshole, but you’ve got to realise we can only give advice on the stuff you’ve told us.
Let’s get back to basics. There are basically three ways to organise money in a relationship:
1. Joint everything. All the money goes into one big pot and is JOINTLY SPENT/SAVED on everything.
2. Splitting proportionately. Any joint expenses are JOINTLY AGREED UPON and each partner contributes in proportion to their income. You earn twice as much as your partner? You pay 66% and they pay 33%. They can do what they want (spend or save) with the rest of their money).
3. Splitting 50/50. Any joint expenses are JOINTLY AGREED UPON and each partner contributes 50% of the costs from their income. They can do what they want (spend or save) with the rest of their money).
Option 1 is saying “We are a team and take all our decisions together”. Option 3 is saying “We live together and love each other but we are still separate individuals”. Option 2 is somewhere in between.
There are some ways to blend these. My husband and I pretty much do the first one but we each have a small personal allowance to spend on whatever we want so I can buy alpaca knitting wool in hand-dyed colours while he can get expensive (read: not DIY) haircuts and buy books. It’s not separate finances, but it’s JOINTLY allocating a certain amount of money to “my stuff” and a certain amount to “his stuff” without needing to get into the details of line items with each other.
Options 1, 2 and 3 would also require a different level of discussion before major life decisions are taken. In option 3, if you quit your job then your spouse can’t really complain as long as you are still paying your half of the expenses. If you quit your job in option 1 then it definitely needs your spouse’s say-so because you are massively changing the money coming into your joint account. Option 2 also needs discussing because you have jointly agreed expenses and if their percentage suddenly rockets to 100%, they need to be prepared for that.
But let’s take another example: buying a house. In all of the options, the cost of the house needs complete buy-in from both partners. Because it is a joint expense that needs to be jointly agreed upon, no matter where the money comes from.
You absolutely can, during a relationship, decide that whatever option you’re doing isn’t working out and you want to change it. It goes without saying that this needs to be a joint decision. And you need to think carefully about how you deal with any hangovers from the previous option, like savings. For example, if you’re going from option 1 to option 2, is it fair that even though you both paid into the savings account for years assuming it was jointly owned (implied 50/50, I guess), you would suddenly split it along income/contribution lines? If both spouses jointly agree that’s the right thing to do, no problem. But if one says it ought to be 50/50 and one says it ought to be 66/33, you need to come to a consensus. (Or, as a last resort, a compromise that you’re both happy with.)
I agree with you that when you’re married for a long time, sometimes the goalposts change. People change, life circumstances change, you never know what’s going to happen. But it can’t be that one person picks the goalposts up, moves them somewhere else, and then says, “Spouse, this is where the new goalposts are.” Or even, in some case studies I’ve read, moves the goalposts but doesn’t tell the spouse. You need to do it the other way round: say, “Spouse, I think we should move the goalposts here.” And only when they say yes wholeheartedly should you both pick the goalposts up and move them together.
So, let’s return to your account of what happened between you and your wife
Only you know exactly what happened. But sit there for a moment and really think about what did happen. Who made which decision. Who communicated it. How. When.
When you were working, were you both wholeheartedly committed to household spending being option 1? When you quit, has your point of view come round to option 2? Have you told your wife? When? How?
When you quit, you seem clear that you quickly realised it would be forever. But your wife seems to have thought it was only for a little while. How did you communicate that it was forever? When? How?
When looking at the options above, do you feel differently about expenses and about savings? It seems to me like you do.
My income average was perhaps 5x hers. There is no significant savings from her and even the 5 years prior to having kids amounted to 13k from a TEA program. So, in terms of contributions, yes, 95% was from me. I'm the one who has funded her IRA's.
I do think that gives me more say in how the savings are spent. Sorry, I know that rubs many people the wrong way, but I expect in other lop-sided income relationships, the high-earner/high-saver feels the same.
One point in always having joint accounts was explicitly that it IS ours. The separate accounts, unless for just individual expenses, has always seemed to me as "this is mine, that is yours", which is not what I like.
It seems to me like you regard spending as something completely jointly owned, but savings as something where you believe that you own the % that you put in.
Can you see how that doesn’t add up? This is probably the most important thing in this whole post.None of the options above is right or wrong. They’re for different people in different places at different times. But whichever option you go for,
I do not think you can have one rule for spending and one rule for saving. For example, it’s OK to decide that you want to define some joint expenses, pay into them 50/50 and then do whatever you want with the rest of the money. That’s fine. It doesn’t make you a bad husband. It doesn’t endanger your marriage. What would make you a bad husband and endanger your marriage is if you decided that (moved the goalposts) and then told your wife that was how it was going to be from now on (“Spouse, this is where the new goalposts are.”) You need to discuss goalpost movement, come to a consensus, and move them together.
(I also want to ask something, and I’m not going to bang on about it but: You earned 95% of the income partially because she took time off work to raise your (JOINT) kids, correct? Please, honestly, get a calculator out right now and work out how much you would have paid in daycare, school bus fees, summer camp, etc if she had not been around. Subtract that from your savings. Give that to her savings. What do the % contributions look like now?)
So, that’s all very well, but you want to know what to DO. Here’s a suggested plan.
1. For one month, STFU about everything she buys and do your utmost to SILENTLY reduce household expenses.You said that you clean the house because you didn’t want to pay for a cleaner. Great! That’s awesome! What else can you do that for? Can you take on all the grocery shopping and cooking? (Don’t just buy food and expect her to cook it.) Can you shop around for insurance? Can you personally go a month without driving? Find every frugal tip you can and try and implement it silently. Your wife shouldn’t even notice. You should definitely not brag about it to her. And do not discuss anything she buys. Track your expenses for this month and compare vs last month (or any average month).
2. Ask her what she thinks you ought to do about working and expenses and savings.After a month, sit her down one time when you’re both relaxed, and say: “Honey, I know I quit work in a hurry, and I know you might have found it difficult since then still working while I’m not. I’ve been thinking that maybe we should look at changing the way we manage our expenses and savings together. What do you think?”
Then SHUT UP AND LISTEN. Don’t say anything yourself except little prompts like “What do you mean by that?” and “Can you give me an example?” When you think she’s finished, say, “Thanks for talking with me. Can I take a few days to think over what you’ve said?”
I know you’ll be absolutely dying to either agree or disagree with whatever she says, but don’t. Just let it go and then actually spend a few days thinking over what she’s said.
3. Present an option and listen.After a few days, hopefully you’ll have come to a conclusion about which option of the three above is the best for you two together. Gently suggest it to her (e.g. “Honey, it seems like you feel very strongly that you don’t want to separate our finances at all. That’s OK, I’m happy to do that, but I think we should have a talk about how to decide jointly what our expenses are. Maybe we should make a budget together. What do you think?”) then SHUT UP AND LISTEN. Rinse and repeat until you come to a consensus.
You need to:
1. Lead by example and shoulder the burden yourself. This will take time. (It has taken me SEVEN YEARS to get my husband to read a library book. And even now he's not sure if he wants to read another one.)
2. Come to a genuine consensus about the way you manage money and your budget.
3. Make sure your entire financial plan together is consistent. (Remember that bolded bit above?)
The best bit of couples financial advice I have ever followed is to ask my husband what he thinks is reasonable first whenever we’re discussing what an expense or budget line item should be. Often he surprises me. It’s like a Socratic dialogue of personal finance – I never demand anything, I just ask questions until he comes up with an answer himself. Particularly when you set the budget line item of “personal spending”, ask her what she thinks it should cover. Ask her how much it should be. You can always funnel your unspent allowance (because it sounds like you won’t spend as much as her, right?) back into savings. And if she overspends on it, don’t pick on the actual stuff she’s spending on. Just say, “Honey, we agreed we’d spend $X on personal stuff. You spent $Y last month. Is everything OK?”
I’m going to be setting a new budget with my husband soon. I expect the conversation to go something like this, with a spreadsheet in front of us.
“These are all the categories I can think of. Am I missing any? OK, so we’ve got £X to spend a month. How much should we spend on A? On B? On C? Etc. Oh dear, it all adds up to a bit more than £X. What do you think we can cut? Hm, it’s still a bit over. Do you think we could cut D? No? OK, that’s fine. How about F? No? Alright. Where do you think we should cut it?”
All in a nice, pleasant, enthusiastic, non-shouty, non-complainy tone. (Sometimes I worry I make my husband sound like a financial idiot on this forum. He really isn’t. He’s just not interested in spending more than the absolute minimum of time thinking about personal finance, and fiddling around with investment spreadsheets is my idea of a good time.)
I’m just going to reiterate something I said earlier. There is no right and wrong answer choosing between options 1, 2 and 3 (or blending them) as long as you move the goalposts together. But
you cannot have one rule for spending and one rule for saving. 
