282. Moving In Together, Part 1: Money, Chores, and the Mental Load

The goal here is not this perfect scoreboard. It's not that everything works really well all the time. It's that you're able to continue to talk about it and nobody is kind of like silently carrying something that they're not talking about. Hello and welcome to another episode of Finding Mr. Hyde the Podcast. I'm your host, Ali Jackson and I am bringing you my positive and practical approach to dating relationships and all that else about life from my lived experience. Welcome back. Thank you for being here. I have been getting so many questions lately when I do my Ask Me Anything question boxes on Instagram about moving in with a partner. Moving in together or where you're already living together and people are struggling or wondering how I've approached things with Skyline and we're about nine months into living together now. So have a lot of learnings from those nine months and thought that I would do a dedicated episode for this topic with not only my learnings but also some of the insights and advice that I've gotten from both guests and listeners in storyative episodes over the last year or so because back when Skyline and I were about to move in together we actually I actually did three listener story time episodes as bonus episodes on the Patreon. So shout out to the Patreon. You can go and hear those three different listeners perspectives about moving in with their partner. They were super super practical and very helpful for me honestly because at that point I was a couple weeks from moving in with him and then Skyline and I as you probably know did a public pod episode right before we moved in together about ways that we were preparing things we were thinking about how we were hoping to set things up. So I have some updates and like you know hindsight's reflections whatever you want to call it on some of those things weaving in questions that I got from you all as I outlined this episode I realized I was outlining at least two episodes. So this is probably going to be part one not probably this is part one of not sure how many parts yet though depending on if more questions from you come in but today from a roadmap perspective here's what you can expect today is like the machinery money protecting yourselves going in who's going to do what like the more I would say functional more objective pieces potentially of moving in together and of living with someone and then the next part is going to be things that are a little bit harder to plan for things that you could definitely try to talk about not try to talk about but definitely talk about in advance but that just might be a little bit more subjective a little bit more based on what ends up happening in your experience when you live together things like sharing a space with another person for potentially the first time for some people you know having different versions of what clean means because that is sometimes difficult to talk about before it's actually happening merging your stuff like little petty things that happen we're going to talk about that so I'm really excited to get into this topic before I do a couple updates on my end speaking of the patreon something that I have started over there is really documenting a new therapy journey that I'm on I as you know I had a podcast guest on the on the pod back in last fall Mandy Dixon she is a therapist who specifically specializes in the cross section between ADHD and paramedicos in women and adult ADHD diagnoses as a result that episode was truly a game changer for me and how I was thinking about my own mental health journey my own hormonal journey all sorts of things and it kicked off a couple of also bonus episodes on the patreon on that topic both my own thoughts as I was as I'm I think entering or maybe already in paramedicos and also a listener story time from a woman who was diagnosed with ADHD at age I think 37 it was so that has been percolating in my mind for the last eight nine months as I've been trying to figure out why the systems that used to really work for me both in my work and personal life seem to be broken now and the coping mechanisms as I now realize they are that used to work for me no longer work and I put some more systems in place over like all my own over the last several months but one of the things that I really began to realize is that the therapist that I had been seeing wasn't really equipped to kind of guide me on that journey towards potentially an ADHD diagnosis maybe something totally different maybe no diagnosis at all just like better more targeted therapy towards those types of things so I found a new practice and therapy group and now individual therapists who we are calling Megan over on the patreon um who specializes in these things similar to Mandy but in New York so I'm really excited about it and I'm talking all about it on the patreon both in specific but you know there are some things that are private but definitely thematically things that I'm learning every week things you know reframes my therapist has brought to me work that I'm doing all that stuff so I'm really excited about that you can find it all at patreon.com/finding mr. height I'm really pumped about it so that is one of the things that has been sort of occupying my brain space for the last couple of weeks because I'm in kind of intake mode with that new therapist were two sessions in and this most recent session was actually less about historical context and more about some shit that's going on in my life currently um my uncle passed away about a week ago as we speak um and that's been really difficult so for you know my my larger extended family so a lot of stuff came up in that session about historical context regarding grief as well but that's kind of what's been going on with me that's what was happening over 4th of July weekend for those who follow me on instagram and know you know kind of saw that I had been offline for a few days I appreciate everybody's uh well wishes and love so that's what that's what happened but I went into much more detail about that on the patreon um and that's really what's put up with me lately is this therapy journey like that's what I really where I've been spending a lot of my mental space I am excited though to bring you this moving in together content in at least two really targeted bucketed places first I want to open it up with our media mentioned for the week and that is going to be a book that I absolutely love it is sitting behind me on my bookshelf fair play by Evrodsky the book came out in like 2019 so it's fairly recent and I think it really gives a nice vocabulary for this whole topic it definitely gave me a great vocabulary for a lot of the things that we're about to talk about mind you I read it as I mentioned in 2019 before I'd ever lived with a partner I think at the time that I bought it I was with ASV if I remember correctly and I and because we were middle distance long distance whatever you want to call it we were spending a lot of time in each other's individual spaces and that's what originally kind of brought me to this concept and this book is because although we didn't live together we were spending extended periods of time living together especially because I could work remotely and so I would go down to his place in Philly for like a week and work from there as he was not able to work remotely worked in hospital so some of these concepts even though it was his place and I was technically a visitor some of these concepts were already coming up so that's where I was first introduced to this book and what it really does is it takes the invisible often unequally split labor of running a home that mostly lands on women stereotypically speaking and it makes it more of I would say like a usable system and one idea that I really love from it is that every task related to the home is like a card in a deck and whoever is holding that card owns the whole thing noticing that something needs to be done planning how it's going to get done and then actually doing the thing and the second that you're only doing something when asked like if it's in a I guess to put it a different way if somebody has to deal you that card and hand it to you every time then your partner is still holding the card so and there are so many relationships where one partner is holding most of the deck at all times and like dealing out cards to the other partner and that is not fair play as as the book kind of talks about it and one of the reasons that I it was brought up for me in talking about today's topic is because one of the listener questions that I got was how to avoid feeling like a mom assigning chores to her kid when you're living with a partner and it's the backbone like that kind of concept is the backbone of how I recommend splitting up labor which we'll talk about later in the episode two more things though kind of vocab wise to talk about from this book that I really love one is that all time is created equal and two is that everyone needs protected space for their own pursuits the first all time is created equal I think goes It is one of, I think, the biggest sources of tension in a lot of couples who spend their time really differently when it comes to work. So that could look like one partner who works outside of the home and one partner who works inside of the home. And that could lead to resentment or misalignment or lack of fair play as the case may be because perhaps the partner who works outside of the home doesn't understand why the partner who works inside of the home is unable to take care of more things at home because they're there all day and I'm putting that in quotes, but like they're working. It's not the same as if they're just like they're not sitting around, right? They just happen to be in the home, but they're not sitting around all day. They are working. And that time is created equally to the other time. But then there's also partnerships where perhaps one partner goes to a job or works like a more typical, you know, salary job, let's say. And the other partner is a full time parent, a stay-at-home parent. Their time is still just as equal and valuable as the partner who is going to the corporate job, even if that job is at home. So there's that piece. And then there's the part about each person needing protected space for their different pursuits and like respecting what that is for each person. I just, the book is really, really good. I highly recommend it. There are so many think pieces about this concept and this book clips on social media, places you can find more information on it. I just, I highly recommend it. I have a question for you. Are you getting rewarded for paying your rent or your mortgage right now? Because if the answer is no, you need to check out built. And that is coming from someone who was obsessed with getting rewarded for literally everything I spent my money on, except the highest payment of the month, my rent, and now my mortgage. But becoming a built member means earning points on every housing payment, no matter where you live. 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It'll tell you about exclusive member benefits at restaurants, fitness studios on your lift rides, and more around your home. And for the homeowners out there, built works for mortgages too. Your housing payment is one of your biggest monthly expenses, so why wouldn't you want to earn points on it? Download the built app and join membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com/fmh. That's j-o-i-n-b-i-l-t.com/fmh. Use my link so they know I sent you. Let's get into though the various aspects of the nuts and bolts, let's say, of moving in with somebody framed by your questions, things that you guys are actually wondering. The first theme that really came up in all of the questions that I received was about money, like probably the number one topic that people are asking about. So as we mentioned, when we did the episode about us moving in together, we planned to do a split, share, 50/50 expenses, and it didn't really change, like our perspective wasn't changed by the fact that I own the condo and Skyline was moving into a place that I own. That turned out to be true. Like in our experience, owning the place didn't really change the math for us. We split, shared expenses the same as if we were renting. We predicted that pre-move and it held. One thing that I think is really, really key in that is both people understanding what the before and after could look like. We mentioned in that conversation a cohabitation agreement, and I think that is so key to getting on the same page. If you don't want to actually sign one, which I very much recommend, but if you don't want to actually sign one, at least having the conversation of what each of you are planning to put into your cohabitation expenses from like either whether it's rent, mortgage, etc. And then what that might look like, where the relationship to end. There are parts of, if one partner owns the home, there are parts of the expenses of that. They're going to look very different from if you're renting. So there's of course your mortgage payment or perhaps your mortgage payment. There are people out there who don't have a mortgage, jealous. But there's your mortgage payment which can more be equated to rent, right? Like it's one payment that you send out every month. And you want to talk to your partner about what that looks like in terms of how you're going to share it. Because something that you are doing when you are paying a mortgage is you are building equity. Again, it depends on how your mortgage is set up. But typically speaking, you are building equity in the home that you live in. And so the question I think you have to ask yourselves, and as the homeowner, I would probably do this individually from my partner and would like want them to do it individually too. And then we come together and talk about it. Do you want to treat it purely financially as if your partner is now your tenant? Obviously, you're in a relationship. It's different, right? But like financially, the way that you're setting it up, do you want to treat it as if your partner is your tenant? Or do you want to treat it as if your partner is more in a rent to own type of scenario where they are actually building equity with the amount that they are paying you. Two extremely valid approaches that the two of you need to align on. And again, back to the cohabitation agreement, I would put it in there because it will mean something different if you move out. And like I said, I think that those two approaches are equally valid, equally valid. But if you choose the second approach where your partner is building equity with the mortgage payments that they contribute or with the payments that they contribute, then you need to keep track of what that is and how much of what they are paying is going towards equity because mortgages also have interest, right? So like your whole payment is not going towards your principle. And that is going to need to be kept track of so that if you need to use that clause in your cohabitation agreement, if there comes a time at some point where you are no longer living together or where you're going to sell that home, it's going to be important that you're keeping track of how much equity that partner now has in the house or in the home because they've been doing like a rent to own type of thing. And that can look a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to be like straight equity dollar for dollar like you can set it up however you want or on the flip side in a cleaner way as long as it works for everyone, it could just be considered rent, right? Like if you're renting a place that you don't get anything if you leave, you just leave. Like the rent that you paid is gone and you can set it up that same way. That would be equally valid. So but that's just that one payment. There are many other things that come in when you own a home that don't when you're renting. You have HOA fees. What does that look like? Maybe what if something like you have your repairs that are sort of like every day like maybe you have to have a plumber com or maybe you have to have an electrician come and fix little or things. What is going to happen though if you have a major expense? How are you going to handle that? And the way that Skyline and I decided to do it is that we said that we were going to have everything 50 50 and if it is something related to like really significantly improving the value of the house. So I'm not talking like fix a pipe because the toilet broke. I'm talking like we're going to redo the kitchen. That would then be increasing the value of the house and therefore that's involved in like his equity from like a rent to own perspective. We have not done anything like that to date. Knock on everything. We have not had anything major go wrong in the house since he moved in. I actually haven't had anything major go wrong since I moved in. So we haven't had to deal with that like big big big expense. We've only had those little or things like we had a plumber com. We had someone come clean out our HVAC system like that kind of thing. But that is the kind of thing that I think if I could go back that I would talk more to Skyline about the every day expenses that surprised me when I became a homeowner, but somebody who has always rented might not be thinking of in terms of like their housing expenses when they were renting was just their rent. And you have a super who comes right at least in New York. If your fridge breaks, if your electricity goes out, if you know the plumbing stops working, if your toilet's clogged and you can't fix it yourself like all of these things, a super will just come and handle it for you and there's no extra charge for that. At least in all the buildings that I've rented in in New York. And that changes drastically when you're a homeowner and I knew that in theory when I moved in, but I was constantly reminded when little things would happen like a hinge came off of one of the cabinets in my kitchen, for example, or I don't have a ladder personally that is tall enough to reach to change light bulbs in the ceiling in my bedroom. I had to borrow a ladder from a neighbor that luckily they had, but if they did not have that ladder, I would have had to pay someone to come do it. These things surprised me when I became a homeowner and in hindsight, if I were moving in with Skyline again, if Skyline were moving in here again, I would, I kind of forgot that. and I would go through these types of things with him and be like, "These are the types of expenses that might come up." It hasn't been an issue, but it just would have been easier, I think, if I'd been like, listen, there's a lot of stuff that comes up when you're a homeowner that you don't even think about when you're a renter. Here are the types of things that surprised me, and we're going to need to put money aside for the year, for these little random things to come up. Like, I have a line item in my budget for home repairs that I never needed to have before, and it's very fluctuating, right? Like, I'll put X amount in for the year in the budget, and I usually spend it all across like one or maybe two months, because it happens, you know, in groups. It's not like a monthly expense that you have. So, that's been fairly seamless for us to navigate together, but it is something that I wish that I had been like, "Hey, this is a thing." So, for the people who asked about already owning your home and somebody moving in, like, that's something that I would really recommend. And if your cure is for more sort of practical advice on cohabitation agreements, one of those Patreon listeners story times that I did with a listener named Anita talked all about the specific cohabitation agreement conversations that she and her partner had, and it was really, really, really fascinating to hear how she was kind of thinking about it. I think pre-naps get talked about a lot, and today's day and age, and they are very common. Cohabitation agreements don't, and I think they should. So, I really, really loved that episode. I'm going to put the links of all the episodes I'm talking about in the show notes of this episode, and they're all available on the Patreon. So, the other thing that comes up with money and sharing expenses is like, where's that money come from, and how are you going to like pay for things on a more day-to-day basis? We talked about this in that episode. I'm obviously self-employed. Skyline is not. At the time when we moved in together, we made about the same. Both of our incomes, though, vary pretty wildly per month, mine because I'm self-employed. So, now, it's more consistent now than it was when we moved together because all of my clients are on retainer now, so it's fairly steady, but that could change overnight, right? Like all my clients good decide they don't need me anymore. Skyline is in sales, and so a lot of his compensation is commission-based, which is not an even monthly thing, and it's also not something that's the same amount every time he gets a commission check. You can kind of predict it and forecast it, but it's not the same amount. So, what we decided to do because of that is think about our annual projections, and then deal with our or decide on our split based on that. And so, based on that, at the time, we went with 50/50, and what we decided to do was to review it annually, and unless one of us, throughout the year, was like, "Uh-oh, I think this is becoming like skewed." And so far, that's been working for us. We are still 50/50. We both feel really good about it. We talk about still good in our stand-ups, our kind of check-ins, and we both feel great about that still. Here's what has changed from how we thought we were going to set things up to how we ended up setting things up. So, we talked about how I was going to be the CFO, and that is still true. I am the CFO, Chief Financial Officer of the Relationship. I fucking love it. I love budgeting. I know that's weird, but I love budgeting. There's a reason that I got into the very numbers heavy area of work that I did. I love it. I love a spreadsheet. I love a forecast. I love a formula. I love all of that stuff. And because of my business and my businesses, I already have a very, very detailed setup in QuickBooks, where I am tagging literally every single expense that comes in. I am tagging it as one business or the other business or personal. And then under that, what within those businesses or within my personal, like what category did it fall into? Because the highest level of tagging, business business personal is required for the business setup that I have. And then within the businesses, it also is required to tag it as like what it was in terms of what my account it needs. But I like to go even more detailed because I like to feed my budget spreadsheet to be very granular. I like to budget out at a very low level of detail, and like see and assess my spending at a very low level of detail. And I love doing it. I tag in QuickBooks. I'm not shitting you literally every day. It's also easier that way because it's easier to remember what you spent yesterday and only tag a couple things. And it's just part of my morning routine. But I love it. I get actually very excited on a Monday because I have the weekends worth of spending and I have more than one day. Or if we were on vacation and I didn't tag things, I, again, I know it's weird, but I get really excited. So I'm already doing that. So what he and I thought we were going to do is have a shared account, a joint account that we each fund based on the split that we've decided on, which at the time was 50/50. And that we would then pull all of our joint expenses from that account. In practice, what ended up, we tried that. And in practice, what ended up working better is actually keeping all of our money separate, but using the tagging system that I was already doing, adding a layer that is joint and a tag rather that is joint and a tag that is him and adding that into my tagging. It takes me like probably 10% more time to do it. I was already tagging joint and so to tag his. So what that now means is that we have all of our individual accounts flowing into one QuickBooks space and then I can export what's relevant for my accounts. And I then tag from there. So I then the way that my spreadsheets work and I updated my spreadsheets to work like this. And it was a very fun few days. The way my spreadsheets work is they look at all of the things that I've tagged as joint who paid for those things because we each have individual cards still. We didn't decide to we ended up deciding not to get a joint card. We have some a couple of of cards we have each other as additional users, but we don't really have joint cards. We have our individual cards. So my spreadsheet looks at okay, here's this joint expense. Like let's say we went out to dinner who paid for it. Okay, Skyline put it on his on his amx. And then but it tags it as joint and then all of the joint things it knows okay of this amount of money that was spent on joint things in the month of June. Alley paid for this much of it. Skyline paid for this much of it. So who owes who? And we're able to handle that with like account transfers. Like we're not vennmowing. We're just doing kind of like account transfers for whoever's going to have to pay the credit card bills of the joint things. It is admittedly a little bit of a complicated system versus if we just had a joint account. But I love it. It's working so well for us. In part because it means that we get to and again this is such a nerdy thing to say, but it means that we get to maximize our credit card reward spending and use the credit card across all of our credit cards that the two of us have because there are some that he has that I don't vice versa. We're able to optimize our credit card reward spending to put the joint things on the card that makes the most sense and not put all of our joint things on one particular card just because they are joint things. And I love that. And it does make it more complicated, but I love it. So that is how we ended up setting things up rather than having the joint account that we thought we were going to have. And somebody else asked a question, what if 5050 doesn't feel fair? And that is where I want to reemphasize that our 5050 split is based on at the time our projected proportional income that was 5050 like we make about the same amount of money. So that's why we have the 5050 split and why I think it's important to continue to reevaluate if that changes because particularly for somebody like me who self-employed that could change. But also maybe one of us gets like a, you know, maybe the corporate person gets a bomb promotion and now they're making 3x what the other person makes. Are we still going to be 5050? It's not so going to feel fair? Probably not. You know, and people's income changes over the course of your life. So I just think whatever you decide to do that it's really, really important that you have sort of like contained spaces available to evaluate that and talk about it. That's why I love the stand-ups. That's why I, you know, call them relationship check-ins, whatever you want to call them. That's why I love that because it gives you the space to talk about something that is or isn't working without feeling like you have to bring it up out of nowhere because you're supposed to be talking about it at that time in that space. And I think that just makes it so much easier. So the split is like a proposal. It's not a life sentence. Like you're not like, oh, we're going to 5050 forever. And if I decide that I want to take a lower paying job because I want to spend more time at home, like if we have kids, then like then I'm going to feel like 5050. Like it's all negotiable, right? It's all things that you can continue to talk about. And that is what we will continue to do. But I've, I was thinking about like what are the things that have changed since we had that conversation and the way that we're like paying for things has changed. I really like it. It probably wouldn't work great for people though that aren't already using a very detailed budgeting system or like expense tagging system because it's definitely not the most streamlined. So I think for people who are not already doing that, I would recommend a joint credit card. or a joint make account or something like that, just 'cause it's easier, and you don't have to start from scratch in terms of all these systems, but I already had them, and I was literally excited to build them out. Okay, so the next sort of big logistical thing is chores. The mental load of those chores, the things that have to happen in the house, and like I said, so many people asked about this, and a couple people in particular made the parallel of feeling like a mom asking a child to do chores in their relationship, and somebody else wrote in what worried that that would happen. She was like about to move with her partner, and she's like, I've heard horror stories of women feeling like they're the mom in their relationship, just like, you know, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, and it ruins their relationship dynamic. People are really worried about that. And I think that's a very real fear. Not that one partner's not going to do the work, but that remembering it and assigning it starts to feel like the other partner's job and build to resentment. And remembering, I think, is the biggest invisible task. Like we talked about this in our original episode, the cat's water fountains. That is something that as a cat owner and a person who has had cat water fountains for a long time, I just know needs to happen, but a person who hasn't had cats doesn't think about that, right? Like these water fountains that I now, I'm like, oh yeah, every two weeks, you've cleaned the water fountains and he's like, what? Because he doesn't have cats, right? So it's that invisibility of like, let's name all of the things that need to happen. So here's a framework that I think is super helpful. And we didn't do it in full before we moved in together, but I think if I could go back, I would. And I really recommend this framework, especially if you are in a spot where you're feeling like you're already in this place where there's this mismatch and you're already feeling it, but I would do it before that even happens. But if you're already in this place, I still think this could be really helpful. So each person writes down a comprehensive exhaustive list of all of the things that are two categories required for the house to run and desired for the house to run. And those are two very different categories. And one of the things that you will likely find out through the course of your conversation is that you don't even agree about what things go in what category. So let me define these categories. Required are the non-negotiables, the things that absolutely have to happen in order to keep the home functioning, regardless of like, taste or preference. So those are things like if you have pets feeding the pets, paying the rent, paying the electricity bill or the internet bill, things that like, if you don't do this thing, it will be very, very bad. Like you absolutely have to, your pets must eat. The electricity must stay on. These are things that are absolutely required. I haven't mentioned things that I actually think are in the desired category that some people might think are in the required category, but like, this should be non-negotiables. And then the desired category are more about taste and standards than they are about actual requirements. So these are things that are like, keeping the counters tidy or deep cleaning on a weekly basis or making the bed. And some people might put, for example, making the bed into their required category. There are no, it's required to make our bed. It technically, it's not, right? But some people are gonna see it that way. And that's why it is so important, I think, to do these lists separately and make them exhaustive. No task is too small, because one of the other things that's going to come out of this most likely is that they are going to be tasks on each of your lists that are not on the other persons at all in either category, because it's not something that they considered. So like if Skyline and I had done this before we had that water fountain conversation, that probably wouldn't have been on his list. And there are certainly things on his list that wouldn't have been on mine. And that is the first thing to notice. What are the things that are on one person's list and not the other? I can think of one thing that would probably be on my required list, but maybe not on his, and that's watering the plants. Because I love having plants, and therefore, for me that's required, because I want a house that has a lot of plants, and that requires you to water them. But technically, that is not a required thing for a household to run. It is only required if you are a household who wants to have plants. One example. So you have all these things, right? Now you gotta figure out who's gonna do them. One of the quotes that I don't remember where I heard for the first time, but that I love is, if it's everybody's job, it's no one's job. And I think I may be heard in the context of work and corporate life to start. It is so relevant here, because the next step of this conversation after you have these things outlined is to talk about who's gonna do each of them. That doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be the same person all the time, but that is a concept in Fair Play, which we'll talk about. It's also called the zero 100 method, which Skyline and I use for a lot of things in our home. But it doesn't have to mean that only one person does it all the time. It does have to mean though that there is very clear ownership expectations. And this is especially important for those required tasks that like have to happen. The Fair Play method is to give one person full ownership of holding that card from beginning to end. And that starts with remembering it needs to be done and it ends with actually doing the thing. And it includes all the things in between. So like laundry is a non-negotiable, right? That's on the required list. Doesn't mean you have to do it. Doesn't mean the person somebody in the home has to do it because there are ways to outsource it. But it is a required thing, you must clean your clothes. So whoever, if it's one person, whoever's holding that laundry card, they need to both realize that laundry, not both, they need to realize that laundry needs to be done. They need to make sure that the things to do laundry are available, detergent, for example. Then they need to do the laundry. And then they need to potentially, if this is part of the task you've outlined, put that laundry away. Now here's where we start to get into desired territory, because like folding and putting away is not technically required. Most people would say, yeah, it is. But like technically, right? It would work if they were on the floor. We don't want that, but it would work. So what's about talking about that stuff? And I think this is where the mental load can silently pile onto one person is when the ownership of that thing is not super clear. One thing that is also really important before going into this conversation that I should have mentioned up top, is that a table stakes part of this working is that both people really want it to work. Is that both people really want the other person to feel heard, to feel valued, and to feel like things are equitable in the home. If that's not the case, it is going to be very, very difficult to make any of this work. And so that's the table stakes, like bare minimum requirement in order for all of this to go well, is that both of you are on the same page about that. That doesn't mean you're going to agree about everything you talk about. But it means that you agree at least in concept that we want to get to a place where both of us feel really equitable about what's happening, and both of us feel really good about where we land. Like we want that, and we care about the other person's feelings in that conversation. That's going to be super important. And I think it's especially important to establish as a kind of ground rule. If you were already in a dynamic where one person is feeling resentful. So for the people who ask those questions about feeling like a mom assigning tours to their kid, that is going to be a really important base place foundation to start with. Like, hey, I want us to both feel good about how we work in our home. I want us to both feel like this is equitable and fair and good. Do you agree? If the answer is no, then that's like a sort of a larger problem, not sort of. So assigning owners, I think that the 0100 method is the best place to start for pretty much the entire list, unless you already know that it is going to work to have shared ownership. And 0100 is just another way of saying, one person is 100% holding the card, the other person is 0% holding the card. And so the budget is a good example of that. I am the CFO. I fully 100% own our budget. Fully. An example on Skyland's end. He owned stuff with the car. We had to do something with the title recently with the registration, like that is fully on him. I don't even know if I am on the emails, but I don't even know what's happening with the car. Fully his. That, I think, is the easiest place to start when you're outlining and sort of assigning things on this list because sharing tasks gets murky quickly if you're not on the same page about how those tasks get shared. So there are things, many things that Skyline and I now share, but that started out, we talked about them fully split. There are also things that went the other way. So I'll give you an example of the last one. So we didn't assign an owner initially for scooping litter and also for the aforementioned cleaning of water fountains and the litter boxes have to get cleaned out about once a month, like fully cleaned out, not just scooped, scooped every day, but fully cleaned out like once a month. Literally, like, I don't know, a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, the litter boxes need to get cleaned out soon. I mentioned, I cleaned them out last month and we'd previously, They've been kind of operating for both of these tasks unlike a switch off kind of basis. I mentioned last month that it is my least favorite thing that I have to do, this is also on the required list. My least favorite thing that I have to do in the home, this has been true since I owned cats, is clean out these fucking letter boxes. I actually don't mind scooping, fully cleaning them out, I hate it, I hate it. It's one of the reasons why I've never considered a litter robot because it doesn't actually remove the thing that I don't like. I don't mind scooping. I hate fully cleaning them out, it's disgusting, I hate it. Skyline, hate scooping. Literally the opposite, but we've never really talked about that. It just sort of randomly came up. And then I said, I would happily scoop the litter every single day if I never had to do a monthly clean out ever again. And he was like, great. What? So that's what we do now. But if we'd gone through like that before, we probably wouldn't have even realized that that was going to be the case. This is the benefit of continuing to talk about things and continuing to evaluate whether things are working. And so if you are in a place where you are already feeling super resentful or you're worried that it might go that way, I really recommend the 0100 method for almost everything to start. And then you can start to see are there things that make more sense for us to share? Like something that Skyline and I fully share and we don't even keep track of it at all is cooking. Both of us really like to cook, both of us enjoy it. And it has worked for us that it's like whoever's available. If we're cooking for both of us, if we're both free, we'll cook together, like we'll make dinner together. If one person is still working and the other person is hungry and they're like, hey, you're gonna be done in like 30 minutes, I'll start dinner, then they'll fully do dinner. One person will do both breakfasts. We don't really have a set system about who's gonna cook. We started off deciding that we were gonna switch off meal prepping breakfasts, like I would do it all one week, he would do it all the next week. And we ended up realizing that was too rigid for us. And we wanted to kind of be more loose to go see about who's cooking, but stay very close on whether that was working. And it is. We don't really talk about who's gonna cook when and it hasn't really been an issue in terms of like, oh, I always feel like I'm cooking or I always feel like I'm doing the dishes because because we share the cooking, we also share the dishes. It's more like, oh, the dishwasher was full, so I emptied it because I was in the kitchen and I had a couple minutes. And that's working really well for us. But again, if you were in a place where you were already feeling that resentment and that misalignment, it's probably best to start with a much more defined role for each person and each task. There were also a bunch of questions about having different understandings of what clean means. And this is where we start to get into that desired category where it's like I said, taste and standard driven and having different definitions of what something looks like. In these situations, I think assigning rigidly is gonna be really hard and what's important instead is to calibrate. Figure out, okay, we each have this standard, define it. What does the kitchen be in clean mean to you? Does it mean that there's nothing on the countertops? Like not only is everything clean in terms of we've wiped down the countertops and there's nothing like gross on them, but it also means that there's literally nothing on the counter and everything is put away in its proper cabinets and everything is wiped down. Like what does it mean to you that the kitchen is clean? What does it mean to you that our bedroom is clean? Does it mean the bed is made? Does it mean that all the clothes are put away? What does that mean to each of us? And then how can we calibrate which standard or a blend of standards we're gonna live at? An example of kind of like different levels of clean, I really find it helpful when my bed is made, even though I don't even see it because it's upstairs now. I have got, I got had previously gotten myself into a habit of making my bed every day and that's something that's really important to me. Not always as good at it, but I really try and it's really important to me. And it's not something that's as important to Skyline, but because that's really important to me, we now are on the same page that whoever gets out of bed second is gonna make the bed. And if we get out of bed at the same time, we do it together. But that has worked really well for us in calibrating, okay, we're going to be at my standard where we make the bed every day. There are other things, here's an example on his end. It drives him absolutely nutty. We mentioned this before, if cabinet doors are open. I'm looking in the kitchen right now, I don't think, I left one open, shit, fuck. All right, but it drives him baddy if cabinet doors are open. Me, I don't care, I don't care at all. I don't even notice them. But that is an example of we live at his standard where I really, really work hard to close all the cabinets at all times so that he feels more comfortable that it is at his standard. But you gotta calibrate. You gotta talk about what are our different standards and how are we gonna figure out which one it is or a compromise between the two. And sometimes whoever wants to live at that higher standard, is gonna own more of closing that gap. So for example, I lived with a roommate years ago who had a much higher level of clean than I did in terms of her standard. Like she wanted to be deep cleaning all the time. I literally never wanna be deep cleaning. We ended up outsourcing that and hiring a housekeeper to come and do that for us. And I continued that when I moved out by myself because I realized why I really do like when everything is more sparkling than I would do myself, but I do not wanna do it myself. I don't wanna spend time doing that. I would rather spend money to outsource it. And that's something I talked to Skylin about before he moved in. I was like, I have this person who comes, I love her. And if that wasn't something that he wanted to contribute towards because he would rather do it himself or rather have a different level of standard, then we would talk about that. But I think if I were the person who was categorically like, no, I want this person to come on this cadence and he was like, it doesn't really matter to me, I potentially would be the one kind of filling in more of that gap that didn't happen in our conversation. But it's something I thought about when we were going to move in together. And I think the more that you can play to each other's strengths to in this conversation, the better. Like one of the listeners who came on the Patreon and did a story time was talking about how she totally locked out because she and her girlfriend have opposite sort of likes in terms of the things that they enjoy doing. And that's true for me in Skylin and a lot of ways too. He likes to vacuum, I fucking hate it. I love to budget, he fucking hates it. There isn't everything, that's like that. But it's nice that there are a few things. So it's nice to take the strengths where you can. And we haven't had to renegotiate much of that. Like I've talked about a couple of the things that we've renegotiated and that we do a little bit differently. But mostly talking through it beforehand really helped us like set off on a good path. And so I think the goal here is not this perfect scoreboard. Like the litter thing could have easily become something that I became resentful of because I hated doing it. And I would rather be scooping every day. We talked about it. And it reminded me, it was like a random conversation. And it reminded me that I need to be more cognizant of anything like that that's coming up to be able to bring up in one of our kind of regular conversations about it. And so I continue to think about where your gaps are. Like one of my gaps that I work on that Skyline mentions to me is that I do not quickly open my packages. I have my own personal mail room sometimes sitting in our entryway and it's annoying. And it is absolutely annoying. And I need to get better at it. And that's something that I work on that bothers him. And I think that talking about those things is really, really important so that one person is not just sitting there silently fuming like, God damn it, her boxes are all over the entryway again. I'm tripping over them. Meanwhile, I don't mind stepping over a box. I know I'm a mess, but it is what it is. I'm working on it though. But I wouldn't know that that was bothering him if he didn't say something. And so I think that just having those conversations is so important. So, woo, for almost an hour of talking about this, I am glad that I moved this into two parts. Geez. Okay. So, our next part is going to come in a couple of weeks and it's going to be about stuff that you can't really spreadsheet. Sharing a space, really merging your things, the emotional parts of living together, of moving in with someone. I'm really excited about that. I'm curious. Let me know in my DMs, if you're a patron, you can use the comment section. I would love to know the money thing or the chore thing that you wish you would nail down sooner or that you're thinking about most if you're in the process of about to move in with someone. Let me know and I will talk to you next week. (upbeat music)