How to talk about money without damaging your relationship
Published on 7 Feb 2026
16 min read
by Leonardo Lemos
Picture this: you're three months into living together, and your partner just bought £80 worth of takeaways in a week.
You notice you're manually tracking shared expenses in a spreadsheet. Do you bring it up? Do you split it equally even though your income is double theirs?
Do you say nothing and let resentment build?
This is the conversation most couples avoid until it becomes a crisis.
Financial disagreements contribute to 50% of divorces in the UK, yet we rarely talk about why these conversations go so badly.
The answer isn't just about communication skills or emotional maturity. It's about infrastructure. Traditional banking forces
you into an impossible choice: merge everything or keep everything separate. Neither option supports how real relationships actually evolve.
At plan/ria, we've spent the past year talking to couples about how they manage money together.
What we've found is that most relationship finance problems aren't about trust or compatibility. They're about being forced
to choose between autonomy and partnership before you're ready.
Here's what the research tells us: 88% of people in long-term relationships value maintaining some financial independence. At the same time, 64% of couples share a bank account. These numbers aren't contradictory. In fact, they reveal something fundamental about modern relationships: people want both privacy and partnership, and they want those boundaries to shift as trust develops.
Yet the banking infrastructure treats relationships as binary. You can have fully separate accounts (manual spreadsheets, awkward money conversations, transactional vibes)
or a fully joint account (total visibility, loss of autonomy, premature financial merger). There's no middle ground. No way to gradually integrate finances as trust builds
over months and years.
This structural problem makes every financial conversation harder than it needs to be. When you're forced to choose between two polar opposites
(the merge everything or keep everything separate extremes), you're not making a practical decision. And the fact is that your partner can judge you for that.
It can sound like you're making a statement about trust, commitment, and the future of your relationship. That's too much weight of a conversation about splitting the gas bill.
The solution isn't better communication or more financial literacy (both help, though). It's the infrastructure. An infrastructure that adapts to where you are in your relationship journey.
Think about how trust builds in practice:
Early cohabitation: You're splitting rent and utilities. You don't need to see each other's Deliveroo habits, but you do need a fair way to divide the bills or decide who pays what.
Committed partnership: You're planning weekends away and splitting groceries. You want visibility into shared spending without feeling being nannied.
Long-term partnership: You're saving for a house deposit (big step) and planning a future together as consequence of that. You need joint financial goals,
but you still want autonomy over personal spending for videogames, makeup, fashion, or even to surprise your partner with a gift.
Marriage or civil partnership: You're managing household finances, mortgages, and possibly children. You want comprehensive visibility, but selective privacy still matters
(surprise birthday parties, personal discretionary spending).
Each stage requires different levels of financial transparency. The problem is that traditional banking doesn't acknowledge these stages exist because banking was designed for a world where people
were not financially independent of one another, and a household income was a single economic unit, often the husband's.
At plan/ria, we're building a platform around a concept we call progressive transparency. Instead of forcing binary choices, we let couples define their boundaries and adjust them as the relationship evolves.
Here's how it works in practice:
This is the foundation. Both partners always see what's being spent on shared living costs, how you're tracking towards joint goals, and whether the household finances are healthy overall.
This is where couples have choices. Maybe you're comfortable showing your dining-out spending but not your clothing budget. Maybe you want your partner to see account balances but not every individual transaction.
You control what you share and when.
This tier exists for couples who want full financial transparency, but it's entirely optional. You might enable this when planning a mortgage application or combining finances fully after marriage. Or you might never enable it at all.
The key insight: trust isn't binary. It builds gradually through repeated positive experiences. Your financial infrastructure should support that progression, not fight against it.
Whether you use plan/ria or not, here's a framework for navigating financial conversations without damaging your relationship:
Don't try to merge everything at once. Begin with the basics: rent, utilities, groceries. Agree on a splitting method (50/50, proportional to income, custom ratios) and stick with it for a few months. This builds a foundation without forcing premature transparency.
"Fair" doesn't always mean equal. If one partner earns £60,000 and the other earns £30,000, a 50/50 split might feel unfair. Income-proportional splits (where each person contributes based on their share of household income) often work better for couples with income disparities. Have this conversation early and revisit it as circumstances change.
Don't assume. Have a direct conversation about what financial information you're comfortable sharing and what you want to keep private. This isn't about hiding things. It's about acknowledging that autonomy matters, even in committed partnerships. Make these boundaries concrete and revisit them every few months.
Start with small, achievable joint goals. A weekend away. A new sofa. A small emergency fund. Once you've successfully saved together for something minor, scale up to bigger goals like house deposits or wedding funds. Joint goal progress is one of the most powerful trust-building exercises couples can do.
Manual tracking is relationship poison. Spreadsheets create administrative burden, frequent money conversations, and opportunities for resentment. Automation removes the emotional labour. When bills get split automatically and contributions are tracked in real-time, you spend less time talking about logistics and more time talking about what actually matters.
We've designed plan/ria around these principles because we believe financial infrastructure should support relationships, not stress-test them.
When you connect your accounts through Open Banking, you maintain your existing bank accounts. We're not asking you to merge everything or open new accounts.
We're just creating a layer of visibility and automation on top of what you already have.
You start by defining your relationship stage and fair-split preferences. The platform adapts its features to match. Early-stage couples get simple shared expense tracking with privacy preserved.
Committed couples get joint savings goals and household health scores. Long-term partners get sophisticated financial planning tools and optional full transparency.
As trust builds, you adjust the settings. You might start with only rent and utilities in the shared tracker, then gradually add groceries, dining out, and entertainment.
You might begin with personal account balances hidden, then opt in to showing them when planning a major purchase together.
The crucial part: you control the pace. There's no pressure to merge faster than feels comfortable. No judgment about maintaining boundaries. No assumption that "serious couples" must share everything.
This is couples-first banking that respects how real relationships actually develop.
The reason financial conversations damage relationships isn't because couples are bad at communicating.
It's because our financial infrastructure forces decisions about trust and transparency before trust has had time to develop naturally.
Traditional banking says: merge everything immediately or track everything manually forever.
Real relationships say: let us find our own balance at our own pace.
At plan/ria, we're building infrastructure for how people actually live and love in 2026. That means respecting autonomy while enabling partnership.
Privacy alongside transparency. Individual identity within shared life.
Money conversations don't have to be relationship landmines. With the right infrastructure supporting you, they can be opportunities to build trust, align on values, and create a shared financial future together.
Ready to manage money together without the awkward conversations? Join plan/ria's waitlist at planria.co.uk and be among the first to experience relationship-adaptive finances. We're launching soon, starting with couples who are tired of spreadsheets and ready for something better the 18th-century banking.
Leonardo Lemos, or simply Leo, broke into the tech industry at the age of 16, and since then, he has been building products and services for startups and enterprises in highly regulated industries, such as finances, transportation, AI, and more. He is a software engineer expert in User Experience, lover of software architecture, CEO, and founder of plan/ria.
He also writes on his personal blog about his experience and insights into the tech industry.
He is a history lover, especially when it comes to British, Canadian, Portuguese, and Spanish history. His favourite place in the world is London, or precisely the Westminster Abbey (but York is a very close second.)
Leo is a Chelsea fan (Go Blues!)
Reach out to him at leo@planria.co.uk or on LinkedIn.