Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union started splitting the bills “50/50” – after the athlete told his wife during an argument inside their former Florida mansion that they were inside “my house that I paid for.”
“My wife looked at me and said, ‘You will never say that to me again when it’s something that we share,’” the former NBA star said on Monday’s episode of the “Club Shay Shay” podcast.
“So when we moved to [Los Angeles] my wife said, ‘I got half on it. You will never say ‘my house’ again – you can say that in the arena!’”
Wade, 41, explained that there was a common misconception about what going 50/50 really means for the couple.
“I understand what 50/50 means. 50/50 means that everything in life, you got your half and I got my half. We gon put this s–t together and try to make 100. That’s how 50/50 goes. That is not how our relationship works,” he said.
He added, “In our life, in our home, 50/50 means [we] purchase it together.”
Wade clarified that the “Bring It On” actress, 50, fully pays for her own responsibilities, like her family members and other expenses, and he fully pays for his own duties.
“My wife is a working actress who spends time away from the family to go work, build,” he said, adding that they “decided together” to go halfway on their shared life.
Besides their home, they also split the cost of any expense having to do with their 4-year-old daughter, Kaavia.
“There are some things I pick up versus some things she picks up but she does some, I do some,” he said.
“If we take a yacht trip, we can do it 50/50 or I can do it myself,” he said. “My wife is a working woman. She’s a boss and an independent woman in her own life.”
Wade also said that Union will sometimes even contribute money to something that Wade was covering just so they could upgrade.
“The house we live in, thank god, Hidden Hills, nice house, whatever, millions,” he said. “We could have had a nice house on my 50 percent too. It’d been nice, she was like, ’No let me put something else on it and let’s live a little differently.’”
Wade said there are about three things in their life that they go 50/50 on and that everything else, she’s “1,000 percent” and he’s “1,000 percent.”
“We decided that certain pieces of our life, we would share in it,” he said, adding jokingly, “I don’t make my wife do anything. If I could, we wouldn’t be in the headlines all the time. I’m like, ‘Would you stop talking!’”
“My wife had this microphone way before I did. Y’all been watching ‘Bring it On’ for a long time. She been bringing it on for a long time,” he added.
As for his thoughts on how the public interpreted Union’s words to mean that they split everything half-and-half, Wade said, “It don’t work like that.”
“I do alright for myself. But in certain moments that we want to do better together, we do better together,” he said.
Wade then joked that his wife has to spend her money because she’s still making money through her acting career, so if he was the one doing all the spending that she would be the only one left with money.
“I told her how many kids i had before we started. I got ex-wives, I got all kind of stuff,” he laughed. My cheese going all over the place. She’s just building all her cheese and I’m spending all mine? There’s a way to do that.”
He then added, “That’s that [Cognac] talking” as he raised his cocktail, before telling the public they have to “stop this small thinking” that he is petty enough to make Union go halfsies on something like a sandwich.
Wade said that they both signed a prenuptial agreement because they both came into the marriage with wealth.
“You a millionaire. You got money. You work hard for yourself. You should protect yourself,” he said of Union.
Wade added that his expenses also include keeping things “spicy” in their relationship.
“Y’all see the big trips. There’s a whole calendar year where I have to step in and I have to make sure that the relationship is spicy. That it’s sexy. This and that,” he said.
“My credit card gets used to everything…So we 50/50 in three [things.] I got 50 to 100 things that I pay for, that I’m responsible for, so thank you all for the think pieces.”
In May, Union set tongues wagging when she shared that her husband splits expenses with her.
“In this household, we split everything 50/50,” she said on the Bloomberg Originals series “Idea Generation.”
“But in the other households that each of us have to support, there’s always this gorilla on your back that’s like, ‘You better work! You’re going to sleep in? Somebody might not eat.’ It’s hard. It’s hard to let that go, so I’m working on it.”
Union said that she has many costs that she worries about being able to afford.
“I struggle with that. I think I just have more responsibilities for my money. So I get nervous like, ‘Oh my God that movie didn’t open [well]. What does that mean? Am I going to have enough to hold everybody up? And everyone’s like, ‘It’s coming. Calm down,’” she said.
“I’m trying to find peace in the journey, not using my anxiety and scarcity mindset to be my engine, which is hard.”
Union and Wade, who got married in 2014, welcomed their daughter Kaavia via surrogate in November 2018.
Wade was previously married to Siohvaughn Funches from 2002 to 2010. He and his ex-wife, 41, share daughter Zaya, 16, and son Zaire, 21, though the former Miami Heat player maintains full custody of their kids.
He welcomed son Xavier with ex Aja Métoyer in 2013 and is also the legal guardian of his nephew Dahveon Morris, who was born in September 2021.
Meanwhile, Union was married to Chris Howard from 2001 to 2006, though they share no children together.
