$133 a month more on subscriptions than people think they spend. Pairly is the list.

Starting from nothing, without building a whole system

Almost every household starts with a spreadsheet, and there is nothing wrong with that. A spreadsheet is free, it does exactly what you tell it, and for the first two months it is genuinely the fastest way to see what is going on.

What tends to happen next is not that it stops working. It is that one person becomes the person who maintains it — and the other one stops looking, because it is easier to ask than to open. That is the failure worth planning around, and it is a people problem rather than a tooling one.

These posts cover both routes honestly: how to build the spreadsheet properly if that is what you want, including the formula for splitting by income, and how to tell when the maintenance has quietly become one person's job.

8 posts on this

Getting started
The bills that only come once a yearInsurance, road tax, the annual subscriptions. Not surprises, just far apart. Divide by twelve, keep the twelfth somewhere, and they stop being events. · 5 min read
Getting started
The household bills checklist: who remembers whatEverything a shared household has to track, grouped by how often it happens, with a column for who owns it. Print it, split it, stop holding it in your head. · 6 min read
Getting started
Budget spreadsheet or budgeting app: how to chooseAn honest comparison. What a spreadsheet is genuinely better at, what it is genuinely worse at, and the one question that decides it for most households. · 7 min read
Getting started
How to build a shared budget spreadsheet for two peopleFour columns, two formulas, and the one rule that matters more than either. How to set up a joint budget spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Excel. · 8 min read
Getting started
How to handle shared money when one partner is self-employedA fixed percentage split doesn't survive a freelance income that changes every month. A structure that actually holds up when one paycheck is unpredictable. · 6 min read
Getting started
How to (partially) combine finances without merging everythingYou don't have to pick between fully separate and fully joint. The middle option most couples actually end up on, explained plainly. · 6 min read
Getting started
The first month living together: a money checklistEight things worth doing with money in the first thirty days, before habits set in that are harder to change than to start right. · 5 min read
Getting started
Moving in together? Have this money conversation firstBefore the lease is signed: the four questions worth answering out loud, so the first bill isn't also the first disagreement. · 6 min read

Other topics

Or see it on your own numbers

Pairly holds the rent, the bills and the subscriptions for two people, splits them the way you agreed, and shows the same picture to both of you. No bank connection, no card to start.

Set up my month, free