The Rachel Cruze Show - TikTok Has Strong Opinions About This Controversial Marriage Topic

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

📈Are you on track with the Baby Steps? Get a free personalized plan. I believe married couples should share finances . . . but the internet doesn’t always agree. In this episode, watch my reaction to a TikTok on this controversial marriage topic and get my take on the top comments. Next Steps: 🎥 Watch my video 6 Things I Teach About Money That’ll Make You Angry or Wealthy. 💵 The simplest way to budget. Download the EveryDollar app for free! Connect With Our Sponsors: Learn more about Christian Healthcare Ministries. Get 20% off when you join DeleteMe. Explore More From Ramsey Network: 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 🎙️ The Ramsey Show   💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 💰 George Kamel 🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman  📈 EntreLeadership   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So the number one financial take that I give out and I get the most hate for is that married couples should share finances. I know, call me crazy, but this one gets criticized all the time. That piece of advice is crazy. So today, I'm going to be reacting to someone else's video about this topic and responding directly to some of the top comments of that video. So make sure to like, subscribe and share this episode with a friends. All right. So here is the TikTok clip that I saw that I thought was so interesting. I don't mean to offend anybody with this question, but can someone help me understand what is the purpose of having two separate bank accounts in a marriage? I don't, I can't understand why. I know quite a few different people who are married, who've been married for quite a long time,

who have separate bank accounts. And they both pay separate bills. Sometimes, most of the time, they don't even know how much money is in each other's bank accounts. I just don't understand that dynamic of a marriage. I don't practice it myself, and I would love to know why.

Me and my husband don't. Even if I had a job early on, we never had separate bank accounts. As soon as we could, we consolidated everything. So I just, is it interest rates? Is it having autonomy from one another? Do you have access to each other's bank accounts?

Like, I just, I just want to understand the thought process behind it. I truly want to understand. So if you have super bank accounts, please enlighten me. I'm so curious what your reasoning is. Okay, so when I saw that, I was like, you know what? That's like, you know, I understand that feeling of like, I get that people do it, but like the why behind it, I think is always what's so interesting. And so the way that she kind of like just laid it out there, I appreciated it. And here's the thing is I'm like, I think there's multiple reasons why people have separate bank accounts.

Now, the reason I would say on the flip side that I always encourage people to combine your accounts is that when you get married, the more you see yourself as a team and that you're for each other in this life, the better. off your marriage is going to be. Not only is your connection and your intimacy and all of that going to be so much stronger and deeper, but also on a tactical level when we're talking about money that you're able to live out of the same account, you're able to say, okay, where's this money going, this bill, that bill? And it's not like you're my roommate and I'm having to divide our bills. And I'm my own self over here. You're yourself here. And we don't talk. We don't merge. We are separate. I mean, it's like, I don't want you to see my calendar. We're not sharing calendars. I want my own thing. I want my own calendar. And it's like, but no, that makes no sense.

Like, logistically, like, you're going to have to know who's going to pick up the kids. And, like, you know, where are you going to go on vacation? And what we hear you taking vacation? Like, it's a part of merging your life together. But money brings out so much fear in people. And I think I see a lot of people just avoid the topic because maybe they're like, okay, well, we just get in fights. We don't look at money the same. And it's just easier if we're just separate. But if I could tell you, if there's anything in marriage that I have learned, I've not been married. 50 years, only 15, these subjects in marriage that really trigger you that come up, those are the ones to press into. They really are because there's something deeper there. And I think because of

people avoid it, they never pull that string and never get to the bottom of what's really going on. And so again, avoiding it or deciding we're going to live separate, people have many different reasons why. And so my team went into the comment section and pulled the four most common reasons or excuses that couples have for not sharing bank accounts. And so here, again, I'm always pro-sharing. I will always say, though, with the asterisk, that if there is something deeply wrong with the marriage, if there is something that there are secrets, you know, there is maybe addiction, maybe there's been an affair. Like, if something is going on that's like really big and you're like, I don't trust my spouse in general, then yeah, you probably do have to separate accounts.

We've even had calls on the Ramsey show, and someone will call me like, my husband won't stop spending, and we're 64, and he keeps cashing out money, and like, we're not going to have anything in two years if he keeps this up. Well, red flag, yeah, you need to protect yourself. So you need your own money. So there are reasons behind this for sure. But for couples out there that there's not this big red flag, you're just living life. Again, combining accounts is so key. So the first thing that I did see come up over and over again, and I experienced this, too, with, my job and talking to people is divorce. And so one of the comments was, tell me you've never been

divorced without telling me you've never been divorced. So there is a lot of damage that divorce causes and people. I mean, it really does. And so, and a big tension point for a lot of people during divorce is money. And so if you've been through a divorce and you've gotten screwed on one side or the other of this issue, you're probably like, whoa, whoa, I will get married again. I will fall in love again, like, all that's great, but, like, I'm not going back through that damage because that was so hurtful, so horrible, so scary, so you put up that wall, which makes sense. I'm like, that's, like, I get that, right? Like, there's almost a part of me that's like, if you're like, no big deal, I would probably be like, hey, do you remember what happened? Like, is there any level of caution you

have that you need to work through? And so understanding that is so key. So if you go into a marriage and you have been divorced where your partner was divorced, again, I'm telling you, even then, I would continue to work on that reconciliation on this topic with your new spouse. And if you need a pre-nup before, that's great. Like, if you need to do that to feel like I'm protected here. But the point is, is that money reveals so much of who we are. And the more of your spouse knowing and understanding you when it comes to your money and how you're wired and how you spend and all of that, the deeper they're going to know you. And so seeing yourselves as a team again, even in a divorce case, is something I would work.

towards. Even if you don't start off there, I would work towards that. Or, you know, maybe it wasn't yourself that was divorced. Maybe your parents were. And you saw, like, a horrible situation play out. So, yeah, talk about that. Work on that fear. Because, again, I don't want the fear of something to stop you. I don't want to lose common sense in it either. But we see time and time again that money is just a magnification of who we are. And the more we can be as a team, the more the way we spend our money and the way we handle our money together is going to be magnified. Number two is getting married it later. So one person common and said one difference is that if you get married young versus later in life when you have your own income, retirement, stocks, investments, et cetera. And yeah, this makes

sense. I mean, if you get married in your early 20s and you're like starting off with, you know, out of college, like once and I were, you have your first jobs, like you're just kind of starting out adulthood and you're doing it together. It is much easier, I think, just to be like, oh, yeah, we're like doing this life together because we're starting off doing this life together from the beginning together. But if you get married later in life in your 30s or your 40s and you're established, you have financial progress. I mean, golly, maybe you've, you have, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars in your 401k. And like, all this stuff, right, that you're like, I have, I have created a wonderful life because I've been wise with money. And then you get married to someone

that maybe hasn't been as wise or maybe as wise, but you still feel protective of what you have built, that you're like, let's just keep everything separate. So, what I would say to someone like that, like, again, totally understandable. I get that. But I'll go back to what I keep saying. The more you see yourselves as one, and the more you say, we are doing this life together, the more enjoyable it is, the more you divvy out subjects of life of like here and here and here and here and here, the more you're going to just see that in your marriage, you're going to continue to divide yourselves emotionally and everything. And so as much as you can be one, But also remember that you will have in your budget, if you do, if you guys do combine and you sit down together and you do a household budget, you need your own line item and your spouse needs their own line item.

And so you can still go spend and enjoy. Like it's not that. It's not like you're giving up autonomy completely. It's like, yeah, you still have money to spend and you have just as much say of how you spend your money as your spouse does with theirs. But we're doing this under the assumption that like this is our money together. And so even just changing the language is huge. All right, before I go on, I do want to tell you about one of our sponsors, Christian health care ministries. So when you lose your employer-sponsored health insurance, there may be a better option than Cobra.

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options to save on health care costs, check out CHM. Learn more at CHMistries.org slash budget. That's cH ministries.org slash budget. All right, number three is autonomy. We just kind of touched on this, but this comment said, being married doesn't mean you lose your autonomy. You are still an individual. It's my money I worked for. Not giving anyone free rein to it.

Don't care how much I love them. Oh, all righty. So, autonomy. I have learned, this is like one of the most vital lessons, and I would tell a newlywed couple of this. And I wish Winston I did this at the beginning of our marriage is you are an individual. So you really do need to focus on like, hey, I have a story before my spouse and I need to work on myself because the healthier you are as an individual and the healthier your spouses, the healthier your marriages. This somewhat kind of codependent language of like, you complete me, I'm looking for you to fulfill me in life. And like, it's you.

You're my answer. All this stuff creates a really unhealthy rhythm in marriage. And so for Winston and I, I'm like, oh, my gosh, to learn these individuals. and then at the top you're you are grafted into one, but you are an individual tree. That was like one of our counselors painted this picture. I was like, it's perfect. Like two trees, two root systems, but at the top, you are grafted because you are one. Like you have vowed your life to be committed to another person.

So you cannot ignore that. Like if you don't want that, don't get married. So there has to be grafting somewhere. But if the grafting is at the root system of the trees, it's going to, you know, choke each other out and the trees will die. And we don't want that. But you have to be connected at some level, you guys, if you're married, if you want a good marriage, I guess you could live your own lives for the rest and you just say you're married to be married. Like it makes no sense.

But if you want a relationship that is so unique on this planet, which is marriage, then there are things that you have to say, okay, I'm willing to do this. Even though this makes me uncomfortable, even though, man, this can be hard. This is what I have committed my life to. And so that's what I see when it comes to money is, yes, you are your own individual person. You have your own money. But when you start to play that tip for tack game of this is my money, that's your money, you start going into scorekeeping and not good. That is not a good place to be.

And I've done that. I'm like, I unloaded dishwasher twice. You haven't. Oh gosh, you've done this four times. I should do that. And Winston's always like, chill, Rachel, but I'm such a performer and all of it. So that is, that it gets to an unhealthy rhythm too. So don't have the scorekeeping.

The more you can look at yourselves as one. I promise the better off it's going to be. But when you have your own separate line items in the budget, you can do this in an every dollar budget. every dollar is the budget that Winston and I use. And there's legitimately a Rachel line item and a Winston line item. And now that our kids are old enough, each of them have a line item because there's stuff that we buy for them and we take it out of their line item. And so that's going to really help show like, okay, here's money here. And then I'll say this to you guys in the marriage

grand scheme of things. One of you is going to want things that the other doesn't and vice versa. So that is going to come up. There is going to be moments of tension. But those are the moments of tension that you want to work through. And if you just keep your, your money separate, you don't work through any conflict, and then conflict creates connection, and then you have none of that. So keep pushing through. All right, number four, last but not least, is laziness. So we're literally too lazy to go to the bank and get a joint account, is what one comment said. So I've heard from different people when it comes to this, but what I know is we have opened up different accounts, you know, for different reasons.

And can I tell you it's pretty easy. Like if there's one bank that you guys like, then close one account, transfer it and go to another bank and open up another account. So yeah, it is going to take both of you showing up at the bank, usually in person. If there's a brick and mortar, you both have to sign things. Like there are, you know, some of those things that you have to do, but you can do it. So don't let the idea of like, oh, it just feels like too much work to be the reason why. And also, I will tell you that studies show that couples who combine finances, they have a better chance of reaching their goals. So don't let this laziness of, oh gosh, it's just too hard to combine accounts. Don't let that be the reason, because there is so much upside to it on the other end

that is so worth pushing through the like, oh God, we got to have an appointment and show up together at the bank. So listen, do it because it is so, so worth it. Okay, listen, I know all of this can be really intimidating and we all kind of bring our own baggage and stories into a conversation. We talk about marriage. So I do understand for a lot of people like that have had really hard situations, really hard stories, why there is a lot of fear and hesitation. A hundred percent understand that. And not just with money. Maybe there's other areas that there is a lot of fear and a lot of hesitation. But any of those pillars in your story that creates that level of anxiety, like go and talk to someone, like actually do the work and dig in and understand how can I heal from those things

so that you can be a whole healthier person. And if you're married, that's the kind of you want to show up for your spouse. So couples combining their finances and me getting criticized and hated on for that advice on the internet, that's just the tip of the iceberg. So if you want to hear more about how the internet is criticizing what I teach, make sure to check out six things I teach about money that will make you angry or wealthy. That's coming up next. You can click here or if you're listening on podcast kit, click the link below. All right, you guys, Remember to take control of your money and create a life you love.