Love and Money: Check It Out

December 3, 2003

BY DEBRA PICKETT

There's something about that checking account -- the one part of her financial life that has not been converted to joint-ownership status -- that reassures Dusanka Verschuur.

Verschuur, 32, has never actually used the money in her personal checking account. But she likes knowing it's there.

"At first I was so concerned about combining everything," says Verschuur, a North Side Realtor who married Merrill Lynch financial planner Mark Verschuur in September 2002. "I felt like I had to have something on the side just in case. I have yet to use it, so my husband's like, 'Why don't we just throw it into a Merrill Lynch account?' But I said, 'I don't know, we've only been married a year.' "

For women like Verschuur, a high-income former corporate strategy executive who bought her first home at age 23, the prospect of managing finances as a family, rather than independently, can be a daunting one.

"Obviously, women aren't going from their father's house straight to their husband's house anymore," says Mary Claire Allvine, a principal in the Chicago office of the prestigious financial planning firm Brownson, Rehmus & Foxworth and author of THE 7 MOST IMPORTANT MONEY DECISIONS: A Couples' Plan for Love and Money (Rodale; $24.95). "When you've had that experience of doing things for yourself, you're not going to want to give up every bit of control."

As couples are getting married later in life, they are also coming into marriage with more debts, assets and deeply ingrained habits, Allvine says, making the act of figuring out how to manage money even more of a challenge than it once was. As it is, money has long been the No. 1 cause of fights between couples.

For the Verschuurs, who had similar incomes and both owned homes when they met, there weren't many points of contention, but there was some anxiety about how much each would want to spend and save.

"She was more comfortable spending her excess discretionary income than I was," Mark says.

"I like to spend more than he does," Dusanka agrees. "That was the biggest sticking point."

Also, when it came to investments, she adds, "He's very conservative. I'm aggressive."

Since Mark had seen other couples struggle with financial issues, it was important to him that he and Dusanka sort everything out before they got married. She wasn't sure about the timing, but, looking back on it, is glad they sorted out most of their finances while they were still engaged.

"It was very time-consuming," Dusanka says, "but it was so helpful because the day we got married, that was something we didn't even have to discuss anymore."

The Verschuurs decided to sell Dusanka's three-bedroom condo, keep Mark's two-flat and rent it out and then buy a new home -- they settled on a Wicker Park brownstone -- for themselves.

"We wanted to find a home that was both of ours because we thought that was important," Dusanka says. "He didn't want to feel like he was living in my place and vice versa."

In that spirit, the couple also decided to combine all of their accounts and investments into a jointly owned portfolio that Mark manages. Everything, that is, except that one checking account.

Now, their paychecks get deposited into a single account, which is connected to an on-line service that automatically pays their bills.

"I used to do everything, but manually," Dusanka says. "So that's been a wonderful bonus of getting married. Every month we get a statement in the mail and sit down and go over it together."

Seeing a complete picture of their financial status each month has helped them both feel comfortable with their joint approach. She feels like her spending isn't unnecessarily constrained, and he's glad to see their savings growing.

"Mark doesn't need to worry about every single item on the credit card bill because he can see that, over all, we're meeting our goals," Dusanka says.

As long as he knows the big picture is looking good, he's happy to leave the details -- like how much they spend on household purchases -- to her.

The Verschuurs are typical, Allvine says, in that most couples end up with a financial separation of duties.

"There's the detail-oriented person and the big-picture person," she says. "Couples tend to naturally fall in line that way, maybe because opposites attract."

In THE 7 MOST IMPORTANT MONEY DECISIONS, Allvine and her co-author, Christine Larson, recommend that the detail person become the couple's cash manager, the person who pays the bills and "makes sure the trains run on time," and the other become the investment manager, "the person who cares what stocks are."

Those roles have worked well for Geoffrey Baer and Amelia Kohm, a Lincoln Square couple who've been married for just over a year.

Kohm, 36, who describes herself as "slightly more organized" than her husband, pays the bills. Baer handles everything to do with their major investment, the two-flat where they live and act as landlords.

Baer, a 47-year-old public television producer, used "the straw basket system" in his single days, throwing all the bills into a basket and paying them when he got around to it. "She pays them all on one set day each month," he says admiringly. "It never occurred to me that you could do that."

In fact, each assumed the other -- long used to being single -- would want to have separate accounts. But they both wanted to do everything jointly. And Kohm, the on-time bill payer and conscientious saver, found she loved the idea of sharing everything. "For me, it was nice not to carry the load all by myself anymore," she says.

"There were some pleasant surprises," Baer says of the few-months-long process of merging their finances. He was excited about revealing his PIN codes to someone. She loved the symbolic value of changing the beneficiary on her 401(k) plan. And both were amused by the realization that he really didn't have to pay her back for the plane ticket she'd bought for him on their vacation.

They closed some of Baer's multiple credit card accounts ("Why would you need that many?" Kohm says with a laugh, and Baer admits he doesn't exactly know) and, after a couple of false starts, devised a system in which he carries a small notebook to record any withdrawals he makes from their accounts.

There's no one right way to handle newlywed finances, says Allvine, but it's important that married couples "act in aggregate."

"As soon as you begin thinking of yourselves as a family, not just a couple," she says, "and have joint goals and priorities, you need to start talking about these things."

And, while impulse might make people, especially those who have been single for a while, want to hold on to separate accounts, Allvine, who is a newlywed herself, says it's a wise idea to have a joint account for most expenses.

"Couples I have seen that have his-and-hers accounts have a hard time getting to joint goals," she says. "For other accounts, even if they're operationally separate, it's a good idea to think of them as being altogether."