u/Faen_02

Me and my girlfriend moved in together and obviously went with the 50/50 split at first. Seemed fair. Except we don't earn the same, not even close, so "fair" started feeling pretty unfair pretty fast. I was fine, she was quietly stressed. Classic.

We switched to splitting proportionally by income and honestly it just... clicked. No more weird tension around who ordered what or why she's hesitant to suggest a nicer restaurant.

The annoying part was the math every month, so I ended up building something like a small app to handle it for us. Problem solved.

Curious how others deal with this. Do you do proportional? Flat split? Separate finances entirely? Feels like nobody really talks about it openly.

My girlfriend and I decided to start living together, and as all couples do, we first decided to equally split all of our costs, thinking that it is completely fair. However, there was one thing that could not have been neglected; we did have a considerable income difference between us.

Very soon it became evident that it is rather difficult to spend fifty percent of your money on equal shares in a couple when you can afford yourself something extra, and at the same time, I would pay more than the other half. Inevitably, there were some underlying tensions between us.

However, the next compromise seemed reasonable; now, we agreed to split all costs proportionately to our net incomes. Now, everything felt perfectly fine and balanced.

But soon another issue appeared - calculations. Every month, we should have been calculating how much we spent and in what proportions we need to split those expenditures.

So frustrated with the manual tracking that I actually created a small web application solely for myself and my significant other during our leisure hours. Enter the numbers of incomes you earn once, and it'll automatically calculate the ratio. Then whenever we enter a new expense together, this program does the calculation immediately and shows what is the amount to be paid by each member at the end of the period (e.g., Person A needs to pay Person B $45 this month). Added even some sort of 'streak' feature, encouraging weekly check-ins for us to discuss everything for five minutes, so it won't feel like the tax service checking on us.

I am not here to spread any link. I simply thought that my story will be interesting since switching from 50/50 to proportional sharing literally saved us from many arguments.

Very intrigued now. How about you folks - how do you approach huge discrepancies in monthly income when it comes to sharing? Do you stick with the proportional method, or you have another approach altogether?