Until I read this thread, I didn’t know people felt that way. We’ve never had joint chequing accounts, and she has kept her last name - and we’ve been married for 14 years.
Well, this makes sense, but it is sort of like the account is basically yours (in that you do the bookkeeping and keep track) and she has access to it. It would get difficult I think if she was doing a lot of transactions as well out of that account.
I am thinking of moving to this system more or less - not having truly joint accounts, but simply giving her access to my account, just in case she happens to need it.
Financial columnist Michelle Singletary pushes joint accounts - that way there’s never your money / my money. You’re merging your futures in other ways, and this can simplify a lot.
I’m the first to say that this might not work for everyone though.
We have a joint account for the majority of household funds. I do maintain a separate account for a little spending money, which was useful in the early 90s when I was on an extended out of town work assignment. I moved my monthly expense money to that account to cover those expenses, without muddling them with the joint funds.
Not that my husband looks at the accounts all that much - or questions anything, really - but it’s sorta nice to feel like I have a small pot that I don’t have to answer to him about. I’d actually encourage him to have a small separate account of his own (but knowing history, I’d be the one to do the balancing!).
One thing we do maintain is separate credit cards. Oh, we do have two joint ones: one for the vast majority of household expenses that we pay off every month (rewards), and one that we use if we think we won’t be able to pay in full (lower rate). But we do each have an individual card. This way if something happens to one of us, the other still has a card that can’t be touched; my info may be out of date but I’d worry the bank would cut off the joint account of a spouse died.
The separate cards came in useful one year when I misplaced my wallet just before we were to go out of town; Typo Knig still had “his” card which we were able to use on our trip. The joint card had of course been deactivated.
This is a great thread and has been helpful for my fiance and I. We actually discussed all of this last night so we’d make sure we knew how we were going to go into things.
We ended up deciding that we would each keep our own separate account and then get a joint account. 15% of our paychecks (respectively) will go into our separate accounts as fun money. This is where we can buy yarn (me), pay for WoW (him), other expenses and include eating-out food.
85% of our checks will go into the joint account, which will then cover all of our bills. That’s approximately 75%* and we can then save 10% of our take home income each month. Our first goal is to have 1 year of living expenses saved up. Then we will save from there.
But we’re both on the same page, months before we actually are getting married! 
- We always round down our monthly take-home and round up the expenses just to make sure we can cover everything easily, so it’s less than this.
Well, I guess you can try that newfangled “discuss and plan ahead” thing if you want. 
Back when I got married we liked to just stumble forward into any ol’ plan and hope for the best. It’s spontaneous!
Sounds like you are taking the best course - talking. As long as you stay flexible and willing to talk the rest will take care of its self. Well, it will be easier anyway.
One thing to discuss is the proportional vs. flat allowance. Right now you both think 15% is fair, but if one of you is unemployed or chooses to stay home - 15% of $0 is $0. So stay a little flexible. We did a flat amount of $100 a paycheck (15 years ago, based off our joint needs). My sister and her husband did a base + thing, so her husband, who made more, got a bigger allowance, but when she was in grad school she got a minimum.
And, of course, all this renegotiates if you have kids, or if you move cross country for one job, or…
Oh yeah, definitely good ideas! We’re not set in stone right now, but figured we should get initial ideas out so we know things we definitely didn’t want to do, etc. (We also calculated how bills will change when it’s one household instead of us each having our own cable and internet, utilities, etc. and figured out how much max we want to spend on rent). That way we have a plan of attack, but it’s a plan we can go, “hey, let’s tweak this” at any time without getting huffy about it.
I like the idea of doing a dollar amount, actually. I might bring that up to him. He makes more than me so a percentage means he’d get more fun money (though it also means he’d contribute more to the bills, so it evens out). Adding to the annoyance: I get paid semi-monthly (the 15th and last day of the month) and he gets paid every other week. Annoying!
I love this post.
I think everyone who is married does this their way and it is hard to understand anyone else’s. To me, whatever works and makes you happy, is perfect.
For us, it was decided before we got married that I would take care of all the money. We both have ‘fun money’ (yeah, an allowance) but otherwise every cent gets used for our expenses or savings. All that money goes straight to me and I deal with it.
Seem crazy? Some think so. For us, it works. He’s bad with money. I am good with money. He flies by the seat of his pants. I am hyper organized.
Not a bill gets paid late and we have a budget that secures our future. About once a month, we have a ‘board meeting’ where I give the monthly fiscal results. (Oh, yeah, I am that anal.)
We still do lots of fun things with our money. This way we just have the money around to DO the fun things.
(BTW, I know of other couples who manage their finances our way, and it is a disaster. So, again, do whatever works within the strengths of your relationship.)
We figured marriage was a joining so we have had joint accounts for 38 years, never had an allowance, we were never kids after we got married. But joint means joint responsibilty also, we are both perfectly capable of completely managing our finances without the other helping and we both know where all the money goes, I can’t remember Ever fighting about money.
See, this part I don’t get - not the “never fighting about money” part (we don’t, either) but the “both completely managing finances without the other helping” and the “both knowing where the money goes” part.
My account has dozens of actions in it each month - some are automatic payments, some are cheques, some withdrawals for this and that. I know what they all are because they are all mine. My wife’s account also has dozens of actions in it - all hers. Without actually sitting down and going over it with her, I’d have no clue what all of them are, unless the entries are self-explanatory.
If we had a true joint account, all of those actions would be in the same account and I would not, without regular financial meetings, know what everything was. With seperate accounts, each of us can regulate our own account independently without needing to consult each other - a small but not insignificant savings in time and organization.
With plenty of money and some general guidelines (“don’t spend $1600 at Nordstrom” had to become one of our guidelines) you don’t have to track it that close - sometimes we overspend, but its easy to move money from savings to cover it (and then I scold Brainiac4 not to spend so much while we build up the savings back). Likewise, I suspect, with very little money, you have very little outside of the budgeted, known transactions - the $40 phone bill and $100 a week for groceries and the money for rent - and since you only have $20 over at the end of the week all discretionary spending is communicated and there isn’t much of it.
I’m surprised that those with separate accounts don’t do this as a matter of course, just in case someone gets run over by a bus.
As for transactions, it has never been even remotely an issue. If I don’t recognize something in the checkbook while I’m balancing it, or she doesn’t recognize a credit card transaction when she is paying the bill, we ask. Maybe we’re boring, but that doesn’t happen more than once or twice a year.
What kind of transactions would be confusing to the average person?
I suppose it depends on how anal one is. My concern isn’t so much an overdraft as that I like to at least know how much I’m spending on this or that, and I want to ensure I’m not being ripped off by some fraud - hence, I wanna know what each item going out of the account is.
I trust that my wife is spending cash sensibly, so I don’t feel any need to know what is going out of her account - she keeps an eye on that.
We split up various expenses, but it is purely an accounting exercise, as we view all the money as being held in common. For example, she has control of the various investment accounts, as she knows the most about investments (for example, she wisely moved most of our money out of equities two years ago).
That’s pretty close to how my fiancee and I do it and mostly for the reasons Malthus mentions. It’s just easier to keep track of stuff, credits and deductions, that come from automatic deposits and payments, and silly stuff related to our hobbies.
Plus, we don’t have all of our eggs in one basket if anything goes wrong – not with our relationship, but rather if an account is compromised or one of us is the victim of identity theft.
For example, my fiancee was the victim (one of many) of a fraudulent transaction, but luckily the perpetrators were “known to police” and she was refunded the amount by the bank/credit card company. But for a few weeks there, her account was screwed. Our account was fine and my stuff was fine, so we still had everything covered.
This is the part I don’t get. Our account has dozens of transactions in it each month and we both know what they are because they are ours. Even though I rarely look at the euro accounts, when I do look at them it is not as though I need explanation of what the charges are.
Every now and again something pops – usually on the credit cards because he charged something work related and forgot to tell me – and then we ask.
Possibly we are just boring.
It’s a sensible precaution but not really all that necessary, as the amounts actually in the chequing accounts are not great, and if one of us (knock wood) was killed, it would all go to the survivor eventually. All of the investment accounts are joint, except the RRSPs (tax reasons), and they have rights of survivorship listed.
It isn’t so much that the transactions would be so complex as to be confusing, but that I would not know what something was. I like to look over my transactions each month, and due to various things that I’m doing, there are lots of transactions. My wife is the same. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a huge problem asking, but why make an accounting exercise more difficult? In aid of what? A symbolic “togetherness”? We have better ways to symbolize that then with our chequing accounts - I’ve never found accounting all that romantic. More like a necessary chore.
Joint bank accounts are great, really. It makes paying the bills so much easier.
But when your wife leaves you because she is a selfish bitch who can’t sacrifice ten minutes out of her workday to spend time with you and help with the kids, even though she fucking works from home, then the joint bank account becomes a bad idea in hindsight. Even worse when she won’t let you touch any of that joint money after the breakup, even though a good 25% of it is your money that you got from EI.
Okay, I’m scratching my head here.
Unless you do everything together all the time, how would you know what the other one is paying for?
Honestly, I wouldn’t have a clue.
To give an example: last year I was hit by a scam at a gas station, when I used my debit card. The scammers rigged up some system which enabled them to steal information and make some fake charges to my chequing account. The cops actually caught them very quickly, and so when I found charges for stuff I did not know what it was, and contacted the bank, they were able to sort it out.
However, if we both charged the same account, it would be somewhat less likely that faked charges would stand out, as I honestly would not know if they were hers or not. I suppose if we regularly went over the activities together, we would know - but that’s an extra step. this way is just easier.
For us, our overlapping hobbies made that confusing, because we can have multiple transactions coming out from the same business(es).
Do you not keep receipts? Maybe this boils down to that? The parts I’ve bolded are what I don’t get. See, I really don’t care what everything is. If there’s a receipt, I enter it and check the statment online (don’t get paper statments) to make sure it cleared.
This is exactly my situation. I’m starting to think that maybe some people just lead simpler lives. We shop at the same stores, get gas at the same station, and have the same monthly bills. Our insurance is shared and home/auto is all lumped together. I guess if you’re using your debit card for every little transaction or writing tons of checks the monthly register might get a bit long. But in my reality, there are only a few types of transactions:
–The regular monthly bills; either a check written or auto WD, both of which are easy to reconcile.
–Normal debit transations; things like the grocery store, Target, gas.
–Other stuff. Still not hard to reconcile because they all have a receipt that goes on the desk until it’s entered. It’s pretty rare that a vendors name on the receipt is something way different than how it comes through on the bank statement.