The moment most couples actually talk about money is after something has already gone wrong: a bill nobody paid, a bigger expense nobody planned for, a number that came as a surprise. By then, whatever gets decided is a reaction, not a plan.
There's a small window before that happens, usually right around signing a lease together or setting a wedding date, where the conversation is still hypothetical enough to be calm. A UK survey by Opinium found that 31% of engaged couples don't actually know whether their partner has any debt going into the marriage. Not a small disagreement about how much, whether there's any at all. That's not a minority of people winging it. That's roughly a third of everyone getting married having skipped a conversation that takes about twenty minutes.
This isn't a piece about romance killing logistics. It's a short, specific list of the questions worth asking before you're both named on a lease, a mortgage, or a marriage certificate, while the answers still just inform a decision instead of unwinding one. It's also one piece of a larger set, see our complete guide to splitting money as a couple for the rest.
Not every couple wants the same arrangement, and that's fine, but it has to be a choice both people made rather than a default one of you backed into. Income-proportional, straight down the middle, or something else for specific categories, rent split one way and going-out money split another, all of these work. What doesn't work is assuming your partner has the same mental model you do without checking. A conversation we've written about in more detail, on what to do when incomes are unequal, is worth having now rather than after the first awkward bill.
Student loans, a credit card balance, a car finance agreement, a family loan that's more informal than official. None of these are dealbreakers on their own. What matters is knowing about them before they're both your problem in practice, even if they're not legally your problem on paper. A partner who's cagey about the number, rather than just embarrassed by it, is worth paying attention to, embarrassment fades once it's said out loud, cageyness usually doesn't.
If you're renting, is it one name on the lease or both. If you're buying, is it one name on the deed or both, and if it's not both, why not. This is the least romantic question on this list and also the one with actual legal consequences if the relationship ends. In the UK, a Women and Equalities Committee report found that 46% of people in England and Wales still assume unmarried couples get some form of "common law marriage" status simply by living together, rising to 55% among households with children. There's no such thing. If it's not your name on the deed, the courts don't treat years of contributing to the mortgage as automatically earning you a share. Around 3.6 million UK couples, roughly one in five, are currently cohabiting under exactly this gap between what they assume and what's actually true. Across the rest of Europe it varies by country, some offer a formal registered-partnership option with real property rights attached, many default to the same position as the UK: nothing automatic unless you've put something in writing. That's not a reason to panic, it's a reason to at least know where you actually stand before you're relying on an assumption nobody's checked.
Savings from before the relationship, an inheritance, a gift from your own family. These don't automatically become shared just because you're now sharing a home, and they shouldn't have to, but it's worth being explicit that they're staying separate rather than letting it go unsaid and become a resentment later if one of you assumed otherwise.
Careers change. Someone takes a lower-paying job, goes back to school, takes time off for a child or a parent who needs care. If your whole cost-splitting arrangement only works cleanly when both incomes stay where they are, it's worth a five-minute conversation about what happens when they don't, before it's an emergency instead of a plan.
Somebody always ends up tracking it, whether that's official or not, and it's rarely split evenly by accident. If one partner is quietly doing all the mental math, that's worth naming, not because it needs to be split down the middle exactly, but because "I didn't realize you were the one keeping track" is a conversation worth having on purpose instead of by accident six months in.
Should we open a joint account before moving in together?
Not necessarily, and definitely not by default. A joint account is one option among several, useful for some couples and unnecessary friction for others. It's worth deciding deliberately rather than opening one simply because it's what a bank suggests first.
What if my partner won't tell me about their debt?
That's worth treating as information in itself. Everyone's entitled to some privacy, but a flat refusal to discuss debt before a shared lease or a wedding is different from simple discomfort talking about numbers, and it's worth naming that difference before signing anything together. If it starts to look less like reluctance and more like something being deliberately hidden, that's worth reading alongside what we've written about financial infidelity.
Do unmarried couples have any legal protection over shared property in the UK or EU?
Very little by default, and this is the single most misunderstood part of moving in together. There's no such thing as "common law marriage" in the UK, despite nearly half the population believing otherwise, so a cohabiting partner typically has no automatic right to a shared home that's only in the other person's name, regardless of how long they've lived there or what they've paid toward it. Rules vary across the EU, some countries offer a formal registered-partnership status with real property rights attached, others leave cohabitants with essentially nothing unless they've signed a specific agreement. The only way to know where you stand is to check the rules where you actually live, rather than assume time together counts for something legally, because in most places it doesn't.
None of this needs to happen in one sitting, and it doesn't need a spreadsheet. It needs about twenty minutes and a willingness to ask questions that feel a little unromantic in the moment and considerably more romantic in hindsight, once they've saved you an argument neither of you saw coming. Cino won't have this conversation for you, but once you've had it, it's built for exactly what comes after: a shared card for the costs you've agreed are shared, charged to each of you the moment something happens, no joint account and no advance top-up required.
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