I find it odd that one would think that you would have to join accounts.
We don’t micro-manage each other. We are both worth the same after 20 years. I guess that’s why we got married. Trust.
double pose deleted.
Whenever the topic of money comes up, (Not here so don’t worry- general comment) it seems what soon follows is some kind of competition about who is more clever than whom. Well, really I think there are many facets and many legitimate ways to do things.
For example, you could consider someone who budgets down to the penny quite extremely wise or possibly not all that wise at all because maybe they simply don’t have enough money to not need to bother with every penny. Etc.
And it seems to never end. Now, we finally find ourselves in the lovely position that we have a large disposable income and many of our peers do too. Yet, I just heard someone sniff and snub someone else over her “frivolous” new diamond ring, then drive off in her own BMW. Gee, how practical. LOL.
I don’t think married couples have to. I’m just curious how the decision making is made with regards to purchases.
For example we have cable, internet, cell phones, kids food at school, mortgage, car payment, retirement, taxable savings, gas bill, etc. Need money for household expense like food, bleach, etc. Need money for clothing, shoes, jewelry on occasion etc.
Without a common budget I’d find that to be problematic to coordinate and to keep feeling “fair.” Does the larger earner get to spend more discretionary? What about a stay at home parent? Do they get an “allowance?” I’m just curious how it’s handled.
I don’t think it’s uncommon to be on a grocery budget.
I pay a modest amount of attention to what I pay at the grocery store. For me there are only a few items where I strongly prefer Brand X. For many products, Brand Y is similar and Brand Z is cheap but garbage. I consider quality, size, price and whether one brand is so good substitutes won’t measure up.
If buying Coke Zero or Diet Pepsi, for example, I would pay a little more for Cherry Coke Zero (new in Canada) or Caffeine free Diet Pepsi. I would not buy a case of Diet Coke even if much cheaper.
My Wife and I married because we love each other. The idea of “Fair” or who can buy what stopped way before we got married. We are us. We do things together or apart. Our goals are the same, but as adults we understand that we sometimes like different things. No problem.
Big decision making (new car, house remodel) is made by both of us. How could it not be? We both bring our knowledge to a center and agree.
Neither of us over spend. That idea is alien to both of us.
My husband and I have no grocery budget, but we don’t have expensive tastes, either. We are both retired. He has Greek yogurt and a bagel for breakfast, a sandwich or soup for lunch, but often some kind of to go from a restaurant. A Jimmy John’s sub sandwich will last two meals.
I’m not much more expensive.
So we have no budget, but I bet we spend less than most people we know.
Our bills are split relative to our income. We don’t put a lot of thought into it. If one of us starts to save “to much” money our first thought is how we can help our family or our partner. We don’t worry about petty stuff. We also don’t look over our shoulders or are fearful of each other’s purchases. We dont worry about who gets more. We have an intrinsic idea of what’s fair and run major things past each other other before buying. We are also suprised on Christmas as we buy gifts out of our personal money.
I don’t have a strict grocery budget but what I have done for several years is keep two ongoing grocery lists.
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Stuff I’m out of or need for a meal this week that I must buy whatever the cost OR I need to reevaluate that need if I am uncomfortable with the current cost.
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Stuff that I’ve reached a lower level of stock on that I am now actively watching for sales on. I haven’t paid full price on paper towels or toilet paper in decades. They go on sale regular and don’t go bad. As long as you have space to store them why wouldn’t you.
A combination of these, an ever growing garden and a love of canning in season has kept my standards of eating rising while my grocery spending doesn’t.
About the issue of separate or shared accounts, I think my husband and I probably share accounts just because that’s how we started out and that’s what we got used to, without putting too much thought into it. Whatever money came in to the house soon went back out of the house, and even paying for two checking accounts would have been too complicated to bother with. It worked okay so we never saw any big reason to change our system.
My guess would be those who keep separate accounts were older, more independent, more fully employed or whatever from the start, and just fell into a way that worked from that perspective.
I would be completely confused and at a loss if we switched to separate accounts now. But it would probably seem just as chaotic for couples who are used to separate accounts to merge them. Either way, the couples are probably used to sharing and come to it with that spirit so it works. Yes?
Also good points!
I still keep getting the sense that there’s a disconnect between the way we are approaching the idea of a grocery budget and the way others interpret it. It’s not about spending as little as possible, per se. On another forum, when discussing this, someone else said their similar-sized family spends literally half what we do. It’s just that we budget everything, in the sense of deciding what proportion of all our income will be spent on what. We might for instance use part of our preset budget to buy ribeyes, or sockeye salmon, or fancy imported cheese. It’s not synonymous with “bare bones” or even “best quality for the money”. It’s just kind of quarantining different sectors of our spending so they don’t affect each other.
I suppose. Shared accounts is the one that seems dangerous to me, though, unless every purchase required both parties to sign off. Unless you have the luxury of having a very large “buffer” (I think someone upthread talked about having $1000 being their “zero point”?), having a joint account just seems like it is asking for overdrafts. The whole point of a check register is to keep track and make sure you don’t go over; if there are two separate check registers but both are drafting from the same account, isn’t that purpose defeated?
But we also don’t have to pay anything for our checking accounts, other than to occasionally order checks (the debit card is free). I actually have three such accounts, and my wife has one.
I think part of the disconnect is that you can only imagine one way of doing things. For example, the joint accounts. You just assume that a joint account would involve two check registers- but my husband and I have had a joint account for over thirty years and there have never been two registers or even two checkbooks. Whether he writes a check or I do, it comes from the same checkbook and is recorded in the same register.
Same thing with "budgeting" , sure there are a lot of different ways to budget and they don't necessarily involve either spending the smallest amount possible or getting "the most bang for the buck". And you can care about the second one without having a budget- if I won't pay 12.99/lb for lamb chops, it's not because it doesn't fit in my budget, it's because it's too damn much to pay for lamb chops and I'll wait till they go on sale. But I couldn't care less about segregating my grocery spending so that it doesn't affect any of my other spending - sure, if I spend too much at the grocery store, it's going to affect my other spending but it's not going to result in the electricity being turned off or being unable to buy gas for my car or not being able to afford my one "date night" a month.
Debit card, checks, budgets? You a Dave Ramsey fan? Nothing wrong with that.
We use a point paying credit card and pay it off each month. We still have to agree to big purchases. Outside of groceries to us that means ~100 or more in day.
The main thing I’ve learned from this thread is that there exist people who still write checks. Basically nobody here will take them, except for maybe once-a-month things like utility bills, and even those have mostly made us go to electronic transfers. Our last book of checks (not the whole box, just the one book) lasted us almost a year.
I hadn’t heard of Ramsey, but per Google he’s apparently a Bible thumper? My wife and I are atheists.
Is this board generally high income? I’m surprised by how many of the numbers people are throwing around look to me to be pretty consistently in the 90th percentile or higher. Or are the lower and middle income people just staying mum on this subject?
We use checks almost exclusively for certain bills (even though at least two of our monthly utility bills are done through online banking). So our checks last a long time too. But there is still one case where I write checks to physically hand someone rather than mailing them: our contractor/handyman. Do people like that in other places actually use card scanners on their phones or something? Ours won’t even email or text, much as I wish he would. I have to voice call him about everything.
But I do occasionally see people write checks at the grocery store, so they are still accepted.
That makes sense nowadays, when (as discussed just above) checks are used for relatively little. But what about thirty years ago? With just one checkbook, what if you were off running different errands?
Seems to me that there’s a third option, which would be a modified version of #2 combined with what you do. Basically grow your savings to a sort of “minimum emergency fund”, and then after that continue to add to it, but in smaller amounts.
So you won’t have quite as much money for fun each month once you have your minimum savings established, but over time, that will continue to grow, and it’s entirely conceivable that you might weather a storm without actually going below your minimum threshold.
At that point, there’s no reason to go into extreme frugality mode- you just keep on like you were, and slowly build that savings back up over time.
I’ve found that the real trick isn’t necessarily to have some kind of super OCD budget process and an iron will, but rather to obsessively and religiously sock cash away into savings. That way, you have a buffer if something gets out of hand, and you don’t have to resort to anything extreme, budget-wise or spending-wise to recover.
I mean, it’s entirely possible to have communication lapses and accidentally splurge $100 on a pair of steaks and a bottle of wine in the same month that you have to pay for your kids’ preschool. The strict budgeting approach would have it such that even if you do so, you won’t run short. The willy-nilly approach would have it such that you’re having to cut back somewhere else to make up that $50. The build-the-savings approach would mean that once you’re over your minimum threshold in savings, you’d just cut into savings for that balance, and build it back up with your regular $50/paycheck savings deposits over the course of the month. (those numbers are just pulled out of my ass- they may vary depending on your particular finances)
One other thing I’d recommend would be those averaging programs that utilities typically offer- where your monthly payment is a rolling average of the past 12 months. I haven’t worked out whether you actually pay more (probably) or less than paying the exact amount each month, but it is definitely easier to plan around- it used to be tough to get an unexpectedly high electrical bill in say… September after an uncommonly hot August, but now the average just ticks up a little bit, and my bills stay substantially the same from month to month. The only utility I don’t do this with is natural gas, and I have one of those market indexed plans, which has paid off because the price of natural gas has dropped steadily for a long time now. Once it starts to go up significantly, I’ll probably drop that plan and go to something more conventional.
I didn’t run errands with my checkbook. I’m trying very hard to think of what I may have paid in person by check 30 years ago- and everything I can think of involved taking a single check from the book -whether it was to pay for the bowling or baseball league or the dentist. Seriously, at no point in my lifetime have I needed a checkbook to run errands - if I was going to write a check , I knew it before I left the house and brought it with me. It went into the register before I left the house although the exact amount might have gone in when I returned.
I used to use the electric companies budget billing (we don’t use gas, so everything including heat and cooking is electric), but it ended up having a feature which sort of killed the whole point of it.
If we used more electricity one year than we had the previous year (because it was a colder winter or whatever), they would give us a bill in the spring that had to be paid all at once to make up the ground we had lost. I never understood why they didn’t just raise the monthly amount a moderate amount and just work it up to even over a slow period of time.
But since they didn’t, now I just put a standard amount of money into an electric envelope every month ($425). In the hottest part of summer, that’s just about right; and in the spring and fall it’s a couple hundred dollars too much. The extra money builds up for the coldest months in winter when it is over $600. So I’m running my own sort of budget billing insurance plan in a sense.
Well damn, I would have needed a grocery budget if my energy costs had been so high. If you want to start another conversation about the return on investment for household energy improvements, I’m sure we have some folks who can contribute.
Well, I guess I can’t say why sharing accounts works for us because I never really gave it much thought. It’s just how we started doing things over thirty years ago when we had nothing. It worked then and still works now that we’re in a much better financial position. I think whichever way you do it, you probably just get a feel for it and work out the details so it works.
If I had to switch over now and have separate accounts, I’d be very confused, just as someone who was used to having separate accounts would probably be if they had to switch over and share accounts. Which makes it “six of one, a half dozen of the other.”