How One Woman's Finances Were Impacted by a Breakup

Earlier this month, Alicia wrote about how she and her husband, Chris, are trying to figure out when and how to completely combine their finances. They’re coming up on a year of marriage, and they still Venmo each for certain expenses.

When you get married, you enter into a legal contract that arguably provides a certain amount of protection when it comes to your financial assets. New York is an equitable division state (versus a community property state), which means marital property is divided in an “equitable manner” (essentially your assets are “fairly divided,” not necessarily evenly split). And “marital property” usually refers to anything of value acquired during a marriage, regardless of whose name is on the bank accounts.

I promise I’m not trying to break up Alicia and Chris’s marriage, LOL! I really like Chris! (He designed this gorgeous opener!) But I was thinking about these legal protections as I edited today’s What It Cost Me, which is all about the breakup of a couple who lived together and commingled their money—but weren’t married. In the interview, Maggy admits that before the breakup, she didn’t realize how vulnerable she was opening a joint account with someone who wasn’t her husband. At the time of their breakup, that account had a balance of nearly $20,000—a not-insignificant sum.

Of course, getting married isn’t a surefire way to protect your finances either. I can’t stop thinking about Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers, and how dangerous it can be for women to completely relinquish financial control to their spouses. Whatever your relationship status, it’s important to maintain control over your money—and to have the big, hard conversations with your partner, so you make sure you’re on the same page.

A big thank-you to Maggy for sharing this story. She managed to take a personal heartbreak and turn it into an inspirational tale! And boy, we could all use a friend group like hers!

Check out our other editions of What It Cost Me:

Age: 30
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Relationship status: Single

Can you tell us about your living and financial arrangements before you and your partner broke up? How long did you date and live together? Had you combined finances? How did you split shared expenses?
My ex and I dated for seven years and lived together for about five years. Before living together, we were long distance for about two and a half years, and we ended up moving in together full time at the start of the pandemic.

Before moving in together, we would split expenses 50/50. When we started living together, we split rent proportionally by income since I earned less than he did, but we split all other expenses 50/50. A few years into living together, I switched industries and started earning more, and we eventually moved to splitting rent evenly as well. We tracked all our expenses in Splitwise and Venmo’d each other the difference every month.

A little over a year before our relationship ended, we opened a joint credit card for shared expenses and a joint savings account. The impetus for this was both intentional but also kind of silly: We really believed that we had a shared long-term future, and also Splitwise put up an aggressive paywall for free users who make multiple transactions a day. The savings account was both for paying off the joint credit card each month and saving for our eventual wedding (no one had proposed yet, but we agreed that we wanted to start saving together). We both contributed an equal amount to the joint savings account from each paycheck.

How were your finances impacted by the breakup?
Luckily, the immediate breakup didn’t impact my day-to-day finances that much. In the months leading up to the breakup, I started holding on to more cash. This might have been some kind of stress response, or maybe some kind of child-of-immigrants instinct to hoard cash when shit’s about to hit the fan.

Two other factors made a big difference in softening the financial blow of the breakup. We were on a month-to-month lease, so we didn’t have to pay to break our lease when we decided to move out of our shared home. We also split our joint savings account evenly, which gave me about $10,000 in cash.

Long term, the biggest impact to my finances is that my rent more than doubled because I moved to NYC and decided to live alone. In a way, the breakup and months leading up to it felt like living through the worst roommate issues of all time, so I really wanted to prioritize having a living space that was all mine and live alone for the first time.

Did the breakup/your emotions after such a big change impact other types of spending? (Like did you take up Pilates? Buy a whole new wardrobe? Start a new hobby?)
In the two months immediately following the breakup, my spending decreased significantly. Part of this is because I decided to move back in with my mom, who lives in the Bay Area suburbs, for a month to rest and reset before rebuilding my life. My mom covered all of my living expenses during this time at home. None of my friends were close by, so my costs for, say, eating out or getting drinks basically dropped to zero, and my activities mostly consisted of long walks through the cul-de-sac.

After I moved out of my mom’s home, I splurged on a ton of ClassPass credits for a month (around $200) because exercising has always been a way I’m able to process emotions, and I missed being around people in group classes. I went to an absurd number of hot yoga classes.

I also went on a 10-day solo trip to Japan roughly three months after the breakup, which I funded using about $3,000 from the joint savings account payout. I decided to take this trip while I was in the midst of packing up our shared apartment, and I was so tired of “unfun” logistics that I wanted to plan something that I could look forward to. I loved this trip, and I loved that I used money planned for a future that I no longer wanted to pay for an incredible experience that was solely for myself to enjoy. The trip was a mix of budget and expensive choices: capsule and business hotels, 7/11 fried chicken dinners and 14-course omakase.

How did the breakup change your short- or long-term career and financial goals?
Before the breakup, my career goals were focused on building a career that gave me enough work-life balance to focus on my relationship and (eventually, hypothetically) raising kids. Over the course of dating my ex, I worked a series of demanding and high-stress roles, whereas my partner’s career was less demanding, and this became a point of tension between us.

After the breakup, I was excited to prioritize career opportunities that would maximize learning and growth. I felt like I could be more ambitious with my career goals because I could dedicate more time and effort to achieving those goals. I could also be more opportunistic. For example, my freelancing work significantly decreased during my relationship since it often required last-minute travel, which was challenging with that relationship. Now that I am single, I can pick up these freelance gigs as much as I want, as long as I don't burn out between freelancing and my full-time job.

After the breakup, I also intentionally put a pause on defining long-term financial goals so I could focus more on living in the present. I set my retirement savings goal, but other than that, I intentionally tried to say “yes” to more things in the present versus saving for the future. Part of this pause is also that I’m still figuring out what long-term financial goals I want to have as a single person: I’m not interested in homeownership, and I no longer need to save for a wedding. I had spent so much time imagining my future as one that’s shared with a partner, so I’m taking the time to reimagine my dream future for myself.

What was the most surprising financial aspect of the breakup?
There were two things that surprised me.

The first was how easy it was to separate our belongings. In the months leading up to the breakup, I would walk around our shared home with so much anxiety about a potential breakup. What would we do about all the furniture we bought together? What would I do with all the plants I’d accumulated over the years? Who gets to keep that framed print we bought at Pitchfork one year?

But when the breakup finally happened, I walked around our home and recorded all of our shared belongings into a Google sheet. We noted what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to sell, plus what we thought we should sell it for. Then it all went on Facebook Marketplace or into a moving box. This task of dividing our home felt so daunting emotionally, but in the end, it was something we could do without really speaking to each other.

It helps that we were both in a mindset of wanting to get this over with as fast as possible versus trying to maximize financial return. I also realized that I wasn’t as sentimental about physical items as I originally feared, and the act of selling shared items felt more cathartic than devastating.

The second thing that surprised me was realizing how vulnerable we were with our joint finances as a unmarried couple. We’d barely verbally discussed what would happen to these accounts if we broke up. When we opened these accounts, I trusted my ex to act fairly. But our breakup changed how I understood him (and I’m sure changed his understanding of me as well), and that caused some stress for me around closing out our joint accounts. I am lucky that my ex and I came to an agreement quickly, and I am lucky that it was easy to figure out a fair agreement since we contributed to everything equally. The naivete we had around combining finances was surprising in hindsight, since we were both financially savvy individuals.

You moved from Chicago back to the Bay Area after you and your ex split. What was it like to move back in with your mom?
Moving back in with my mom after the breakup was unexpectedly amazing. Instead of feeling claustrophobic like I usually did when I was car-less in the suburbs, it felt freeing to revert back to being a kid. I didn't have to worry about meal prep or post-work plans. My mom also treated the emotional disruption of the breakup as she would an illness, and she used traditional Chinese medicine practices to “heal” me (think: lots of tea and medicinal broths). As someone who doesn’t follow TCM in my day-to-day life, I was surprised by how comforting it was to have this thousands-years-old playbook for feeling better that I could follow.

Emotionally, I felt so supported by my family while I lived with my mom. My mom and grandparents immigrated here in the ’90s, and part of me was worried about how they would react to my breakup, especially since culturally, marriage represents a type of stability that I felt like they wanted for me. They never made me feel any kind of doubt over my decision to end the relationship, and this validation was really special. I got to spend a lot of quality time with my family, and I especially cherish the time I spent playing mah-jongg or walking with my grandparents, who are now in their 90s.

When I first moved in with my mom, I knew that I would only spend a month in her home, and having this clear timeline also helped the experience feel more like a healing retreat versus a full backslide into adolescence. Even though my day-to-day looked more like my teenage life, I still felt like an “adult” in that I had a plan to live on my own again.

How was your career impacted by the breakup? Were you working remotely? Or did you have to find a new job when you moved back to the Bay Area?
I was working remotely in Chicago, and I was able to move to the Bay Area and eventually to New York City without needing to find a new job. I am so grateful to have this flexibility, as it made it so much easier to change my life and to support myself emotionally after the breakup since I didn’t have to also disrupt my source of income. Having the structure of work was also helpful, as it gave me something to do and think about every day that didn’t have to do with my ex or our life together. I had been in my job for a few years at this point, so it was also something familiar in the midst of a lot of big life changes.

I was actually planning to leave this job a year or so before my breakup, but when the relationship started to go south, I didn’t have the capacity to job hunt while also navigating the relationship at the same time. About four months after the breakup, I started job hunting again and was able to find a new job that was a better fit for my long-term career goals!

How did living with your mom positively or negatively impact your finances?
Living with my mom helped me save a bit of money. I didn’t have to pay for any other living expenses, but I did have to pay my half of the rent of the Chicago apartment. This was an agreement with my ex since we needed to give our landlady some notice before we ended the lease.

You eventually moved from the Bay Area to New York City. What prompted the move?
I wrote down a list of my friends and where they lived, and New York City was by far the leading city. I’m also close to my sister, who moved to NYC a few years before I did, and I had been thinking about living in the city ever since she moved. I thought it’d be fun to be in the same place as adults (which we’d never done before). Also, all my single friends are in New York, and I wanted to be around other single people!

I didn’t have any furniture when I first moved to NYC, so all of my friends sat on the dirty floor of my empty apartment as we ate the snacks they brought together.

How did you financially prepare for the move?
I used the remainder of the money from our joint savings to pay for the move, so I didn’t need to do too much additional saving leading up to it. I talked to other friends who had moved to NYC, so I was prepared for all the costs of signing a lease.

I also sold the majority of my possessions in Chicago, so I didn’t need to pay to ship too many things. When I was packing up in Chicago, I shipped a few boxes to my sister in Manhattan, so she could hold them for a few months until I moved to New York. And I left some boxes with friends in Chicago to ship later. I initially moved to New York with just two checked suitcases and a carry-on bag.

How did your friends help you, emotionally or financially, through the breakup?
I felt so incredibly loved and cared for because my friends really stepped up for me, with labor, time, and their familiarity with the New York rental market.

Since I was on the West Coast, my New York friends would view apartments for me and Facetime me so I could see what the unit looked like. They’d tell me if the apartment was a good deal or if there were red flags. I could text them a StreetEasy listing that morning and they’d plan a viewing a few hours later. I could not have found my apartment—which I love—without them.

When I first got to New York, I only had my clothes and my work laptop. On my first night, my friends and sister welcomed me to the city with paper towels and toilet paper and flowers and Trader Joe’s snacks (all the essentials for a new home). My mattress hadn’t arrived yet, so they also lent me bedding and an air mattress, which I slept on for the first week. They cooked for me and gave me leftovers to eat throughout the week, since I didn’t have any cooking utensils.

I furnished my home almost entirely from Facebook Marketplace, and they’d show up to strangers’ apartments with me to lug a dresser into the Uber XL waiting downstairs, and up four flights of stairs to my new studio. One of my friends built my IKEA bed frame completely by herself. Another friend helped me install my AC unit once the weather got warm.

Since my ex and I had dated for so long, a lot of these friends were (and still are) also friends with my ex, and one thing I appreciate is that they listened to me and gave space for me when I wanted to talk about the breakup. They were so supportive and loving while still respecting the relationships they have with my ex.

You and your friends came up with a creative way for them to give you home goods to replace those that you lost in the breakup. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
I wrote up a list of kitchen appliances and other home things I needed in a Notes app and shared the list in a bunch of different group chats. My friends could then pick things off the list and gift them to me! For example, a friend’s parents were downsizing and had a ton of extra kitchen things—utensils, colander, potholders—which she collected from their home in New Jersey and brought back to Brooklyn for me. My friends also pitched in to buy me a new air fryer in my favorite color for my birthday.

Even my brand-new friends pitched in. Someone I had just met had an old blender from her sister that she gave me once she learned that I needed one.

I felt guilty about asking for help at first, like I was a burden, but my friend looked at my list and told me that she’d much rather give me the things I need versus buying another wedding registry gift for a couple who already had two blenders.

How did your experience with your last breakup impact how you manage finances in future relationships?
In the future, I don’t think I’ll combine finances with anyone until after we’re married. I’m also more inclined to get a prenup if I ever do marry. There’s so much emotional and logistical work involved in a breakup, and the idea of minimizing as much of the financial headache as possible sounds like a good idea for future relationships.

At the same time, I’m worried about going into new relationships with too much cynicism from my breakup. I’m working on processing my feelings around the breakup so that my financial decisions in future relationships come from a place of love and security, not fear.

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