A Real Warning to Engaged Couples: “Stop Venmo-Splitting Bills Like Roommates”

Shelby is a blended-family mom with three kids of her own and a fiancé with his own child. She’s a homeowner, and someone who climbed back from a bankruptcy after her first husband passed away. She now has a six-figure job and splits her mortgage 50-50 with her future husband.

But otherwise their finances remain separate. And sometimes there are small disputes, like the fiancé’s suggestion he pay less for groceries because he has one child to her three. The couple has been together for three years, but “he wants to wait until we’ve been engaged for 2 years before we get married,” Shelby explained, to “make sure that you’re the one.”

Ramsey Show co-host George Kamel didn’t mince words on the arrangement. “I’ve never heard of a successful marriage where they’re Venmoing and bickering over ‘You like it colder, so you have to pay more of the electric bill,'” he said. “You know who does that? 19-year-old roommates who share an apartment.”

Co-host Jade Warshaw worried about the future of the marriage. “There is a very shallow commitment here,” she said. “It’s like, I’m only going to go so far in.” Her practical advice: do not combine money before the wedding, but if the relationship is solid, push for the wedding sooner rather than later. “Even if you were the most solid engaged couple ever, I would still say, ‘Hey, right now you don’t need to have your money combined because the deal is not done.'”

Once you treat a household as a partnership, every dollar of income and every line item of spending should run through one budget, the hosts advised. A joint plan handles kid-count, income asymmetry, and one-off expenses without anyone keeping score on a phone.

Engaged but not married is a legal gray zone. Without marriage, there is no automatic spousal inheritance, no community property protection, no joint tax filing, and no clean recourse if the relationship ends with a shared mortgage. Given her bankruptcy history, Shelby should be cautious. Combining accounts with a fiancé who wants a two-year engagement could expose her to a legal mess she cannot easily exit.

Tips for Couple Money Management

1. Match the money structure to the legal structure. If you are not married, keep finances separate and document every shared expense, including who paid down principal on a jointly owned home.
2. If you are married, run one budget. List every income source and every expense, then allocate by category instead of by person. Personal spending lines for haircuts, hobbies, and gifts can live inside a joint plan without separate accounts.
3. If you split bills proportionally, consider using income share, not 50/50. A partner earning 60% of household income would cover 60% of shared costs. But some couple may decide to split everything evenly from the shared income pool. It’s a personal choice.

Venmo can settle a dinner tab between friends, but it cannot run a marriage, and a payment app receipt is not a substitute for a shared plan.