I didn’t expect getting serious again to make money feel this complicated
I’m 56 and have been divorced for almost eight years. I’ve been seeing someone for a little over two years and lately we’ve started talking more seriously about what the next stage would look like. The relationship itself is easy, it’s the financial side that’s making me think way more than I expected. I own my house, she owns hers and we both have adult kids. I’ve spent the last several years getting my retirement back on track after my divorce and she’s done the same in her own way, so neither of us is relying on the other financially. Now we’re talking about whether we’d ever live together, if one of us would sell a house and what combining anything would even look like if we eventually got married. At 30 I probably would’ve thought you just merge everything and figure it out, but at this age there’s so much more history behind both people. Houses, retirement accounts, kids and twenty plus years of building separate financial lives. I’m not worried about commitment, I just don’t want either of us to make a decision that creates problems later for our kids or for retirement. For anyone who got serious with someone again in their 50s, how much did you combine financially and how much did you keep separate?