Sharing money is the first step to building a village

It's hard to have a village with an individualistic attitude about finance

Credit: Michael Jerrard and Unsplash

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Before getting to today’s post, I’d like to direct your attention to Hearth Matters, where I recently appeared to discuss things like village building and how I came to be writing about this topic. It was a wide-ranging conversation, with a number of questions that really made me think more deeply about things like community and family. Check it out and give them a follow.

A couple of weeks ago, Slate published an advice column with a question from someone dubbed “Betrayed in Boston.” The writer explains that he and his partner — they’re not married but have been together for eight years — don’t combine finances and had figured out what seemed like an equitable way to split expenses (65/45). The problem is that the partner experienced a big bump in salary, but never mentioned the larger income. Betrayed in Boston now not only feels betrayed, but is left contemplating a variety of other ways to split expenses that would be more “fair.”

Look, I will say right off the bat that I was exhausted just reading this letter. Being in a relationship has plenty of built-in challenges, and I can’t imagine having to expend a bunch of mental energy doing math problems just to make sure my partner isn’t shortchanging me on laundry detergent. I get that couples in the beginning stages of relationships have good cause to watch their money closely. But at a certain point — again, this couple has been together for eight years! — why do this to yourself?

But the letter does raise a larger, age-old question: Should couples combine their finances? Does this lead to better outcomes?

The short answer is that — with the usual caveat of do whatever you want, it doesn’t impact my life — yes, it appears that there are benefits to combining finances. But I also think the reasons here matter: Money represents a useful opportunity to create a group-centered, family-over-individual mentality.

Put another way, building a village is, among many other things, a collective financial enterprise. And so I’m skeptical that you can create much of a foundation for a village if you’re looking at money through an individualistic lens.

That there is a wide range of opinions on this matter will surprise no one (and is something I’ve touched on previously). This is a perpetual topic in my various social media feeds, and typically the commentary I see favors keeping at least some money separate. A number of well-known financial gurus seem to agree, as this Atlantic article from 2022 helpfully points out.

What I found more surprising is that quite a bit of research indicates that couples who combine finances enjoy a variety of benefits. Earlier this year, for instance, MarketWatch found that couples who combine bank accounts are the most satisfied in their relationships and argue the least about money. LendingTree came to a similar conclusion last year.

In the same vein, a peer-reviewed paper from late last year compared couples who combined bank accounts to those who didn’t over a period of two years and determined that “financial interdependence helps newlyweds preserve stronger relationship quality throughout the newlywed period and potentially beyond.”

Brad Wilcox also covers this topic in his recent book Get Married, referring to some of the same research but also combining it with first-hand reporting. He spoke, for instance, with one woman who said that sharing finances as a couple “fueled a virtuous cycle of communication, trust, and mutual dependency in the financial arena, which is one reason she now feels rock solid about her marriage.”¹

Brad also refers to a study that found that “individualistic arrangements appeared to undermine women’s relationship satisfaction and reduce feelings of intimacy, sexual compatibility, and satisfaction with conflict resolution.”² Moreover, researchers have found that “couples who identified more with a ‘team’ mindset, who regularly sacrificed for one another, and yes, also shared the same bank account and last name, were more likely to be satisfied with their sex.”³⁴

Reading these findings, what strikes me is that if I want the most successful relationship, I probably can’t go wrong modeling it after the most successful people. Whether people have good relationships because they combine accounts, or they combine accounts because they have good relationships, I’d prefer to be like them.

Relationship quality, though, is really only part of the story. This is, after all, not a blog about how to have a better marriage. It’s a blog about how to build community, using family as the core foundation. If it takes a village, how do we build one?

The answer to that question is multifaceted. A family village needs a kinkeeper, it benefits from people who see each other often, it needs people of different ages and skill sets, and so on.

But at its root, a village is a web of interrelated financial commitments. This is true in literal villages, where a community might collectively expend resources on roads, a school, or defensive measures such as a town wall or night watchman. You can see the same principle at play in village-like families who work together on a collective enterprise. I profiled one such family in late 2022, and the key takeaway is that the family’s shared business endeavor (in this case, a real estate brokerage) has bound them together and maintained a distinct group identity across at least three generations.

Having some such shared enterprise strikes me as one of the most reliable ways to create a multi-generational family village. I make this point often on this blog, but emotional ties are fickle and families that stay together often reinforce their feelings with finances.

The financial piece of village life is apparent even in families with less explicit joint business ventures. In my family, for instance, the kinkeepers — people who do the work of keeping the family together — tend to be those who do the least formal wage labor, or at least have the most flexible schedules. So, the strength of our village depends on our ability to maintain a certain baseline level of wealth that enables someone to avoid having a day job.

The point I’m trying to make is that villages require people to make collective decisions about money. That real estate family I profiled, for instance, at some point had to sit down together and decide if they’d spend everything on themselves, or if they’d use their money to build something bigger. The fact that the family business is still going means they’ve chosen for many years to invest in the group rather than cash out.

In other words, to have a village is to fundamentally adopt a group-first attitude about money. We talk a lot about other issues — childcare, loneliness, elder care, friendship, etc. — when it comes to villages. But this is really what a village is: the willingness to share resources. It’s an ethos that reimagines the purpose of money; it’s no longer a tool for acquiring pleasure, but rather a vehicle carrying the family forward.⁵

A single couple is just a village in embryo. But I just don’t see how you can get to the point of sharing resources — be it a family company or generous babysitting duty — with a group if you can’t even merge accounts with your own spouse. If I’m nickel and diming my wife in the name of “fairness” a la that Slate couple⁶, am I likely to turn down a raise so we can hire the next generation at my family real estate business? Will I pass on a lucrative job offer because it’d mean moving away from an elderly parent? Will the welfare of the group be my greatest concern, or am I clinging to an individualistic attitude about money?

Ultimately, selflessly sharing resources with one’s partner is the absolute most basic level of village building, and if I can’t do that I might as well just give up on having something deeper and bigger.

Luckily, marriage, as a concept, has evolved to push us in the other direction, toward the group. As Brad notes in Get Married, the people with the most successful relationships “have discovered that one of the key ingredients of a strong and stable marriage is seeing that a core purpose of marriage is focusing on a project bigger than yourself.”⁷

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1. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad Wilcox, 2024. Page 147

2. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad Wilcox, 2024. Page 148

3. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad Wilcox, 2024. Page 159.

4. One common objection to this kind of research is that people who are already less likely to argue about money, or who are already satisfied in their relationships, are the ones who might be most likely to combine accounts. The peer-reviewed paper I mentioned above pokes holes in this argument, however, because in that instance the researchers actually assigned couples to merge their money or to keep it separate.

5. Speaking of vehicles, one of my favorite metaphors to use on this blog is that of a family in a ship, floating through the ocean together. Families can choose to stay in the big ship together, or they can all get into little life boats and drift away. A lot of families drift apart today, but when a storm comes, I’d rather be in the big ship. Which is to say, there’s safety in sticking together. To tease this metaphor our further, who pays for the ship? Who outfits it? Money matters for village building.

6. I am aware that the question in Slate arose because one partner failed to disclose big raises, which does indeed seem like a betrayal to me. But the fact that one half of the couple betrayed the other, and then the response is to hash out a new “fair” agreement — again, after eight years together — suggests to me that this couple has bigger problems about openness and communication. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they just joined all their money into one account they could both see. Would that solve any problems? I’m not hopeful in this specific case because it seems like the pettiness is probably already entrenched. But the research suggests that’s exactly what happens for many people.

7. Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization. Brad Wilcox, 2024. Page 183