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You Contain Multitudes!
Joe Lilli
You should totally invite any polyamorous people who sees this and wanna share about their experience to do a video! Like the ones you do with tipping culture. That’d be interesting.
Great idea! I will happily do it 🤩
Jk we are all broke haha (but happy lol)
a rugby team’s worth of people hahaha
I feel you, I do NOT want to deal with all those people😅
I’ve encouraged my wife to have other partners (since I do) and she just looked at me and said “Dating involves *shudder* PEOPLE. Nope.”
And that was that.
I’m poly and, unsurprisingly, there’s no one answer. My partner that I live with have no desire to be remarried. We split bills mostly down the middle and have our own income, 401K and investments. I have friends who are a triple, but one is working part-time towards her masters, so things are definitely not split evenly. It just depends. As with ALL things poly, communication is key.
Came here to say something similar. It doesn’t take CPA-level financial knowledge. It takes adult-level maturity and communication.
Yeah, this is basically how I’ve seen it, too. You divide it up based on a consensus of what feels fair, just like you would with roommates.
For me, I have a partner who I own a house with and we have a QPR roommate. Partner and I have joint account that we each put 65% of our income in to split the cost of owning a home and towards shared goals like vacations. QPR pays a low rent amount to contribute to bills. Since they aren’t building equity like us, the QPR doesnt contribute to the cost of renovation or repairs. We then all have our own funds to spend on ourselves and our other partners. My bf and I split the check on dates. But just like with friends we all specify before hand if something is on us or split. This is the system that works for us but its not a one size fits all solution
QPR mentioned! That’s so cool to finally have the scoop from someone living it, instead of theories and ideas about queerplatonic relationships.
tbh i have learned sm from my poly/queer friends abt communication, emotional management and planning for the future they’ve completely changed my adult way of thinking lol
You put on your gas/oxygen mask first. Have a strong grasp of your foundational needs and what you are willing to redirect funds from in your life to a partner(s).
Then you see who needs what kind of help and decide what level of support to give.
Also, not all polyamorus relationships get to a financial entaglement stage. Plenty stop at the “i assume you will say no to activities you can not afford”.
The best answer (I don’t want to talk to more one person when I get home).
I get that it’s kinda funny to say it, but in reality it’s not necessary for this to even be a problem.
If you don’t live with partners, boom, not applicable. If you live with one partner, and have other partners, it’s often scheduled so that your attention is focused on who you are with.
The only time talking to more than one person would be a thing would be if you have more than one partner staying with you at home, or you allow communication to happen on your other partners time.
I don’t want to talk to ANYONE when I get home 😂
I got a good chuckle with the “small claims court” bit
When I had a partner, we were basically financially independent from each other. I use my calendar to pay bills and keep track, my partner uses their own system, and we just decided who would pay which bills, and those bills were our individual responsibility. They also made way more money than I did at the time, so they paid the rent and I paid utilities. When we moved into our own places, we obviously kept separated finances. Most poly people have “nesting partners” that they live with and then just other partners that they have a non-domestic relationship with. Also most of us are otherwise queer, so we don’t tend to do traditional gender roles with who pays for things, we just divide it up however it makes sense and if everybody holds up their end, it works great. Sometimes people don’t do that and it’s shitty, and either they ask for help and the whole group helps, or they don’t ask for help and they lie about it and it harms the group. But you see that in monogamous relationships too, so 🤷 at least with poly people, there’s multiple partners to help when a disaster happens
I pay for myself and my partners pay for themselves unless someone speaks up that they are paying for others, just like my friends and I. I am a relationship anarchist and I live alone so I don’t have split things like a thouple would.
Forthright, self-reflective communication becomes all the more vital in ethically non-monogamous relationships. That helps with monetary conversations. Also, polyam people tend to have fewer nesting (i.e. cohabiting) relationships vs total relationships.
I’m not poly, but in a three person QPR. I live with my brother who is disabled and on social security. That makes his portion of the bills very unbalanced, but he contributes a few select bills and my income covers the rest. Spending is otherwise separate. The third, by best friend, only lives with me seasonally (she works out of state the rest of the year). We also keep finances separate but pays rent on the months that she is in town. I make enough to cover the rent and bills without her rent portion, but it pads the vacation fund when she is around.
Most of the people I know who are poly in the long term are EITHER in the financial chaos/many roommates place in life anyway OR are rich enough that sharing a household with another person is a want, not a need. People in the middle between those two ends seem to have the most trouble with wanting all their partners to be equal but realistically not being able to decide questions like “do I move for work” with more people
It’s kind of a mix of “Within the household, there’s a shared account for rent/utilities/shared groceries that we all pay an amount into based on individual income,” and “Pay for yourself when we go out eating (unless you say ahead of time you plan on paying for someone else when going out).
There’s also a little bit of “My lover in Christ, it’s 4 bucks, *I don’t care*.”
That last statement really resonates with me. I’m neither poly nor in a relationship, but if it’s 5 dollars or below don’t Venmo me. 😂
Thanks for sharing! Am curious how things work at the dating/pre-cohabiting stage of the relationship.
I met a thrupple once who formed an LLC as a marriage contract
That’s kinda badass
How? Lol
I used to work with a guy who was poly and he taught me so much about Excel. I imagine he used it to track finances, addresses, birthdays, what day of the week he spent with who, what he kept at each person’s place. He had to have been using Excel. And i know it wasn’t from work because his previous job was stocking shelves at a grocery store.
note to self: get organization tips from
poly nerds (speaking as a adhd goblin)
The financial dynamic doesn’t seem confusing to me at all. The real question is who gets to sit in the front seat when everyone goes out.
I use Spiltwise for group trips to keep track of who owes what. It’s awesome.
I’m in a poly relationship & it’s actually true that there’s usually someone in the polycule who is really into accounting. Polyamory itself is largely about organizing schedules & stuff like that, which is why so many people from the nerd culture are into it
I think you’ll get as many answers as there are different constellations of polyamory honestly. I’m in a closed throuple where we all live and own a house together, so for us it’s largely just shared accounts where we split costs in three instead of two.