Folake* (36) has been married for 7 years, but a well-intentioned attempt at financial compatibility almost ended her marriage in the first year.
In this story, Folake recounts how losing her financial independence and her husband’s spending habits pushed their relationship to the brink, and how separating their finances became the unexpected solution that saved their marriage.
As Told To Boluwatife
The worst fight of my marriage happened a few days after our first anniversary, and it was because of money.
My husband, Diran, had taken ₦200k out of our joint account without telling me. He didn’t do it for any sinister reason; we both had access to the account and could withdraw money at will. Our one rule was to inform the other of the transaction and what we planned to use the money for.
Or at least, I tried to do that.
Diran wasn’t the best communicator and often struggled to share what he spent money on. Most of the time, a debit alert was how I’d be notified about the transaction. Then I’d have to ask him before he’d remember spending an amount of money. It was slightly annoying to only hear he spent our money after the fact, but I absorbed my annoyance and tried to ignore his habit. Until the day I couldn’t anymore.
When I saw that ₦200k debit alert, I literally felt intense anger well up inside me. It wasn’t the random ₦20k or ₦40k he could spend and come and explain to me later. ₦200k wasn’t small money, and I was really angry that he’d spent that amount of money without consulting me first.
For context, this was 2019, and our combined salaries totalled approximately ₦550k. ₦200k was close to half our salaries, so it was not a negligible amount of money at all.
I was angry, but I didn’t plan to shout or make a big deal out of it. I thought I just needed to calmly explain why that kind of behaviour was unacceptable, and we’d work things out. But Diran worsened things the moment he opened his mouth.
He told me a mutual friend, who had suddenly become homeless, needed an urgent loan and would pay back in instalments over six months.
But as he spoke, I felt something snap inside me. It wasn’t the money itself; it was the betrayal and the lack of consideration.
I knew the person involved and would’ve probably agreed to the loan because of the seriousness of the situation, but I couldn’t believe he’d make such a decision without speaking to me about it first.
Before I knew it, we were screaming over each other. He argued that the need had come urgently and that he planned to tell me about it the moment he returned home, but that wasn’t good enough for me. What happened to calling me?
Then he said I was micromanaging him. I said he was irresponsible. He said I didn’t trust his judgment. I said I didn’t trust our joint approach to finances, which felt like only one person made the major decisions.
We argued for hours. At the end, he stormed out of the room, and we slept in separate rooms for the first time in our marriage. I cried into my pillow for hours that night. Maybe I was being dramatic, but I really felt like our marriage was ending.
We’d dated for three years before marriage, and had never fought like that or raised our voices at each other before. That night felt different, like our union as I knew it was ending. After crying my eyes out, I came to a realisation: the joint account arrangement was killing us, and we had to end it.
Interestingly, we didn’t enter our marriage blindly. Before the wedding, we promised each other transparency. We thought sharing everything, including money, was the mature thing to do.
I grew up watching my mum depend entirely on my dad financially, and I never wanted to be in that situation. But when our premarital counsellor at church talked about “oneness” and “financial unity,” it sounded noble and romantic. So we agreed to merge our salaries: 80% from both of us into a joint account, which we both had access to, and 20% left as personal money for data and transportation for work.
The thinking was that we’d use the 80% to cover our joint living expenses: food, rent, utilities and leave extra money for joint projects like a car in the future or real estate investments.
Our joint arrangement worked for the first few months. Diran and I didn’t have strict “gender roles,” so a lot of the time, he handled market runs and cooking, and buying whatever we needed at home.
Since 20% wasn’t much, we usually ran out of personal money by the middle of the month, so we also used money from the joint account for transportation and personal needs, such as clothes, maintenance, and basically anything we needed.
I started noticing cracks in our arrangement as we approached the eight-month mark.
Diran isn’t a prudent spender, so there were things he bought that I thought were unnecessary. On top of that, he rarely communicated with me before spending money. I didn’t like it, but I said nothing to avoid him feeling like I was pocketwatching because my money was involved.
Additionally, I began to feel limited in what I could spend money on. One time, I wanted to buy myself a pair of shoes I saw online. At ₦56k, they were quite pricey, but I thought they were worth it. And I deserved it; I was always the one watching the budget and trying to make careful expenses. But when I made the purchase from the joint account, Diran looked at the alert and said, “Ah babe, this month is tight o. You couldn’t wait?”
It was as if someone had pressed on a childhood bruise.
I had spent years trying to escape the image of my mother asking my father for permission to buy anything. That was the moment I realised how easy it is for love to become dependence without even noticing.
The whole thing started eating at me. I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was tightening my own spending while he was spending as he liked without bothering to check in with me.
I didn’t say anything out loud, and — looking back, I should have complained earlier — resentment slowly grew in my mind. Since I had access to the joint account transactions, I couldn’t even escape the reminders. Every debit alert felt personal.
The night he gave out ₦200k without a heads up broke whatever thin thread was left. It was like, why couldn’t I spend ₦56k without discussion, but he could make a move like that?
We gave each other the silent treatment for a week after the fight. I even made a show of packing my bags to leave until he sat me down and said, “We can’t continue like this. Please, let’s talk.” So, we did, and finally admitted the truth to ourselves: a joint account wasn’t for us. It could work for other people, but ours magnified every financial difference between us.
We decided to restructure everything, and I must admit, we got the idea from some Christian marriage sermons we watched online during this period.
Instead of pooling the majority of our money in the joint account, we only sent savings there — between 15% to 20% — for future joint projects. Then we agreed to commit 50% of our salaries (still in our personal accounts) to living expenses. We created an Excel tracker and assigned budgets for each item.
When either of us bought anything from our 50%, we noted it there. That way, we didn’t have to do the “What did you spend money on” conversation; we could just see it there. The remaining 30% – 35% of our salaries was personal money, and we didn’t need to police what we spent that on. Of course, personal money sometimes had to come back to the home when the need arose. When that happened, we communicated and settled it.
It sounds like a small change, but it saved our marriage. We still use a similar approach today, though my husband contributes more now since he has a better-paying job and we have children.
I’ll always preach the gospel of separate accounts. I enjoy financial independence, and he’s happy doing his own thing. We come together when we need to and talk about money without tension. In fact, our marriage is the healthiest it has ever been.
At the end of the day, keeping our money separate turned out to be the most united decision we ever made.
*Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
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