When Sarah Reeve got engaged, she gave her fiancé Lee an ultimatum: he had to pay his debt before she married him.

“I was paying my mortgage and my bills while he was giving his mother some rent,” Sarah says of their situations when they met in their early 20s.

“I told him I wouldn’t marry him if he had debts,” says the 45-year-old.

So they set a wedding date two years in advance, giving Lee time to pay off the £2,000 bank loan (£4,000 in today’s money)., external – I had gone out to buy a car.

Once Lee’s debt was paid off, the couple paid everything into a joint account and Sarah took charge of the bills, savings and budgeting.

“He said, ‘You can fix it all and take care of it with the money because I’m rubbish with that,'” she says.

Sarah’s experience reflects a wider trend in which more than four-fifths of women are actively involved in managing daily finances, such as daily expenses and household budgeting, according to the St James’s Place Women and Wealth Report.

Sarah earns £24,000 working part-time in insurance and Lee He worked in maintenance at the same factory for 27 years, earning around £26,000, before being made redundant four years ago.

He is now self-employed in property maintenance and earns around £30,000.

The couple, who have been together for 25 years and have two daughters, ages 19 and 21, have always thought of money as something shared.

“It’s very much our money, not mine or yours, which is really good, especially since I didn’t work for four years when we had kids,” Sarah says.