I have just heard/read on Google search results that women are more likely to manage the household finances than men. They know how to manage the money. They control the finances. They pay the bills. They manage the budget. They have financial conversations with financial advisors. They control the spending and major purchases. They control household finances, investments and retirement planning.

I also read online articles about personal finance, and I always sense the underlying lifestyle or family values or assumptions or expectations aren't quite the same. They seem to come from a different frame of mind.

Then there is my family. I always see my dad opening up a big spreadsheet of the household finances. He is the one who always pays the bills, and that's an easy job. He just presses a button, done. Bill is paid. (He showed me the entire process too. He literally clicked a button.) I asked him if he kept a budget, and he just said, "no budget." I think he misunderstood me. I tried to look for the Chinese term, and I found 預算 but based on the characters, I think it refers to a prediction or estimation of how much money you are going to spend in the future so that you don't overspend. 預告 and 預測 and 預習 are similar terms with the same character 預. Another term is 記賬 which means recording the finances, and my parents would tell me to do this because they want me to have a good habit, and I think both meanings are included in the English word 'budget' because I feel like English speakers would use 'budget' to talk about how much money they have spent already as well as how much money they will spend.

It is usually my father who has financial conversations with financial advisors at the bank. He will take me along too, because my person needs to be there for my own accounts.

I don't think my father controls any spending. In his words, all his money belongs to my mother, and my mother's money belongs to me. And it is my job to take care of it in the future. Before the marriage, my mother didn't care that she was treated to expensive 湯包 (soup dumplings) because they weren't married. But once married, she began to see his money as her money and her money as my money.

On major purchases like the house, they make the decisions together.

My father is the one who has invested in the stock market though and is the one who is interested in researching companies to invest in. He is not a professional investor in anyway; he is just a research professor in a science field. Because he is the one making investments, he is also the one investing for retirement, aside from the employer's retirement plan and the social security benefits.

I once asked him about our monthly expenses, and he just said it was so-and-so value. When I found out that it also matched his monthly paycheck, I felt we were living paycheck-to-paycheck. No. That was only his income. We were only living on his income, minus whatever amount taken away for the retirement fund. My mother's income was saved up. My father seldom touched my mother's bank account money, and when he did so, he did so because he needed to pay the bills.

Somehow, my parents managed to scrap enough money together and buy a house in an affluent neighborhood while also being the poorest family there. I remember us sleeping on the first floor / ground floor because the first floor was cooler. We don't use the dryer so often like Americans do, as my mother insists on sun-drying everything because (1) it's free and (2) UV radiation works and (3) it smells good. We only carry out 1 trash bin and 1 recycle bin every single week, but our neighbors all seem to have quite a few bins, and we wonder how they consume so much trash. We figure that it's because Americans -- at least upper-middle-class Americans -- enjoy readily prepared foods while we would buy a whole watermelon and eat the red flesh and the rind. Plus, our neighbors tend to have multiple children and multiple pets, while we just had a household of 3 (dad, mom, me) and no pets.

I have a feeling that my own parents' way of managing finances involves a great deal of trust--more trust than most Americans can bear. It involves either suppressing personal desires or only having personal desires related to the benefits of the family. It requires high self-control, self-sacrifice and high levels of commitment. Also, the couple has to treat themselves as husband-and-wife, as one family unit, not as individuals with separate and independent lives. I am actually single, but if I were to find a local partner here in the USA, then I don't think I can replicate my parents' relationship. It is much too risky here. I would have to make sure that my money assets and my partner's money assets stay separate, and that we can have a joint bank account for shared things. We would also get a pre-nuptial agreement so that my assets and my inherited assets will still be mine. I would like to live on only 1 income, my partner's income, so that I could be like my mother and save everything in the bank, perhaps in certificates of deposit. That way, my entire savings could be used for buying a marriage-house for the next generation. I have heard of the 529 plan and I will put money in that too.

In Chinese culture, the man's family is expected to buy a house and a car and have some savings and offer some 彩禮 (betrothal gifts), so if I had been living in China, then my family would just have to be the recipient. The betrothal gifts can be waived. When my parents married, my father didn't offer much in terms of betrothal gifts because all of China was poor, and his parents were factory workers and didn't have much to give. My college-educated physician maternal grandmother just saw the man's title (a PhD--a rare kind), saw the potential and approved. When my maternal cousin married, her husband's family couldn't offer up the usual amount of 88萬 （88 Myriad RMB, equivalent to 120,559.51 USD）because they were farmers. My maternal cousin's parents knew that their daughter had been in a steady relationship with that man since college, and likely didn't want to ruin it so they waived it. The husband's family nevertheless paid 100K RMB (13,699.94 USD). Because it's such a bargain, it's expected that the parents-in-law would treat the new woman better as they don't have to worry about money and financial issues.

If I manage to settle here in the US, and the husband's family is also immigrant Chinese, then I predict there will be the cultural expectation that they will provide the betrothal gifts. But if the husband's family is not Chinese, then they will not feel the cultural expectation to provide anything. That's not a problem for me actually, because my parents have told me that they will buy the marriage-house. But because the parents-in-law will not feel any expectation to give, they will not feel a sense of relief when they provide nothing, and worse, they may feel entitled. I recall reading a research paper on interracial relationships in which the researcher went out and interviewed interracial couples. And the researcher found out that the American man's family sometimes had racist views and behaviors against the Asian wife. Millennial American men are typically the children of Baby Boomers, and the Baby Boomers grew up in an era when racial segregation was accepted by default, and social views were just beginning to change. The 1990 Millennials grew up during an era when America was the sole hegemon of the world, and Soviet Union already collapsed and China was not yet strong enough so it kept quiet. Asian immigration to the USA rose. More established Americans had to deal with the incoming of so many Asians around, and some of those children who grew up during this era are now the modern-day Asian-American authors who write about that kind of experience. It's all related. So, even if a non-Chinese husband will love me and appreciate me, his family may think otherwise. I may fall into the "Millennial" age cohort, but I am actually on the younger end of the spectrum. I think there is a whole decade's worth of Millennials ahead of me, probably the children of the older Baby Boomers.

TLDR: I don't know if this is typical of Chinese immigrants here in the US or Chinese people in general or Asian people in general... or if this is just unique to my own parents and me. But anyway, if I were to settle here permanently in the US, then I think it's better for my partner and me to both be financially literate (like, knowing how credit cards work) and savvy with money (like, being able to engage in saving and investing) simply because one of the biggest reasons for divorce is MONEY MISMANAGEMENT. I would rather take an honest person who won't lie to me about his personal expenses than a person based on race, physical appearance, ethnic group, cultural group. Of course, I think the tricky thing is, people like to hide some things about themselves or they may feel uncomfortable in discussing finances. But Two Cents has provided a nice set of questions that I can discuss with a future partner: 5 Money Questions to Ask Your Partner! Hope it works, though, and I can get an honest response.