disparate incomes

My partner has always made considerably less than what I do. When she was working full time she could pick up the monthly condo fees, would have her own spending money, pay for certain groceries and pay for the odd meal out sometimes. When she was laid off she was on EI for nearly a year which essentially paid pocket change so paying for the monthly condo fees ended. Her EI benefits ended a while ago and she's been unemployed since.

She has decided that her current career will likely never pay enough money and she thinks it's a dead end for her. So she's going back to school this fall for four years to get into a new career. That means I'm essentially stuck paying for all the bills during that time even if she gets a part time job. Fortunately, her mom is paying for the schooling.

Because of this my investment plans are scaled back a fair bit right now. I would have loved to have had more money at my disposal for when the stock prices were so low... I understand JC NewGrad's feelings on this and I don't think there's anything wrong with being unhappy about it and if this is a long term relationship, your RRSP is really for the both of you so I don't see wanting to contribute but not being able to as selfish.

I'm not happy about our current situation in the short term but can see in the long term that this short term pain will make for a good long term gain. When she does start her new career after school is done, it will still pay far less than what I'm making (though it will increase decently over time) but it should be enough to support both of us, which her old career could never do, so I can use most of my money for investment purposes (RRSP, TFSA and mortgage lump sum payments) so hopefully we can have early financial independence and can then freely decide what we want to do with our lives at that point.

I would just want some clarification of your relationship:

married
engaged
common-law
non co-habitating

How long have you been together?

Would you stay in the relationship even at the risk of her taking you into backruptcy?

Has she showed any commitment to meeting you halfways financially?

To give a bit more an answer to your original questions, my wife is a stay at home mother, but even when she worked my salary was much, much higher than hers. We do have different ideas about spending and we are still in the early stages of my career and have had quite a bit of debt to chew up from all my years of schooling.

As a result, we went to a system where I control all the finances - bills, investments, etc. I pay her a regular allowance each month which she can spend on whatever she wants. The household necessities are bought on credit cards which we share but she does not put her personal variable expenses on these cards. I pay all the credit card bills at the end of the month.

It has worked reasonably well for us despite our different relationships with money and kept most financial disagreements relatively small.

I'm sure as we get closer to retiring all our debts she will request a larger allownace which is fair enough once we can afford it.

My boyfriend stays home and takes care of the baby and I work but am self employed and work a lot from home.

Before I just paid the bills and he would ask me if we had money for this or that which stressed me out when we didn't. It just seemed too parent/child to me. Now he is involved in making the financial decisions and knows what is going on.

A word of caution though in my previous relationship I ended up with tons of credit card debt that ruined my credit.

Even though my boyfriend is not working we have similar views on money and saving and he tries to save money on groceries and stuff. If possible he is more conservative than me. So if because of circumstances your partner is not contributing that is different than being a slacker or having different priorities than you do which can cause problems later.