second this. if you stay out of leadership I think it's a lot easier to have a healthy relationship with work. you set your boundaries and stick to them. highly improbable anyone will know any different.
I quit a high pay/low cost of living job to move to a high pay high cost of living job when I was young. The skills, connections, experience I got were great but eventually it was clear I wasn't on a path for long term happiness in that city. I then quit that high pay/high cost of living job to move to a low cost of living area. I bought a house, which was unattainable in hcol area. I ended up getting promoted to comparable pay after a few years. I am now planning to go from leader to individual contributor role soon. I have saved enough in retirement accounts to still retire early, but I'm not in a hurry because my partner wants to work another decade or so and generally be stable while we raise kids.
you might Google and read up on the concept of "coast fire", which is essentially front loading retirement savings then working lower paying jobs while you let your savings compound.
It doesn't really matter how you do it as much as how you talk about it. Like most aspects of a healthy relationship, communication is key.
State law is really important if the relationship fails and you need to split commingled assets. If that's something you're worried about you should speak to an attorney.
To directly answer your question, we both direct deposit into a joint checking account. We spend on cash back credit cards that are auto paid out of the joint checking account each month. Mortgage and car note are out of the joint account. We both maintain access to small spending personal accounts/cards on the side for gifts and misc. stuff we don't want to discuss.
When the checking account gets over our healthy buffer of ~2-3 months spending, we sweep the extra to a taxable brokerage account and invest it in index funds.
We "pay ourselves first" with prediscussed, significant, automatic contributions to retirement savings, college funds for kids, or any key milestones like down payments or big vacations. that way any money that stays in the checking account or misc accounts are relatively guilt free and discretionary.
Of all of the things that I mentioned, contributing to retirement and big milestones before we can "touch" the money has been the most important for our peace of mind. we don't fight over money because we've already aligned on the big stuff.
I spent a week touring Rome and didn't see a single public bathroom.
Every society makes its choices and some of those seem weird when you look on the other side of the fence. The US is unique, sure, but so are other countries.
That's a point of view that would change quickly if you were in one of those management positions.
You get to a point where it's impossible to do the work anymore. There's too much of it. You have to develop teams, processes, structure, etc. that delivers the outcomes you're accountable for with full knowledge that you cannot do them yourself. It's very different than doing the work and experience shows that fewer people are capable of doing it, especially with any repeatability. The working world yearns for effective managers.
I encourage you to compare the productivity of the modern multinational corporation to any commune in history. The people working in collectives are not stupid or lazy. It's not an effective structure.
Nuanced but important distinction: these are ICD-10 diagnosis codes. They are only loosely related to what is billed and would not show up in the pricing data referenced by the OP.
College prices are about as real as hospital prices. Sure, some outliers literally pay that much, but the vast majority receive a discounted price for various reasons. When you factor in those discounts, the cost inflation is 2.5x instead of 17x as the article suggests. It's more than a forgettable idiosyncrasy. It's "how it works" and if the author of the article doesn't mention it, they're either so ignorant as to not be worth reading or they're being dishonest.
I thought it was important to give that context.
American higher Ed is often about prestige and branding. The pricing strategy is similar to luxury goods.
Let's hope the single payer isn't Medicare then, because you would have a lot fewer hospitals. Here's the money quote straight from the horse's mouth "In 2021, Medicare’s payments to hospitals continued to be below hospitals’ costs in aggregate" https://www.medpac.gov/document/march-2023-report-to-the-con...
Medicare and Medicaid are subsidized by a shadow tax on working people. Commercial insurance, like the majority of readers of this website get through their employers, pays roughly double the cost per procedure as Medicare and Medicaid. Your health premiums would be lower if we all paid the same price, but your taxes would be higher.