double post
Amen!
There is also a lot to be said for not confusing what you have, with where you put it.
A practical question for Voyager: It sounds like you and your wife have only a few accounts jointly in both your names. May I ask how you would manage if accounts in your name were frozen? What if, for example, you and only you were the victim of identity theft? One day you discover that all the accounts in your name have been frozen due to a creditor making a claim against you. That could taken some time to clear up. In the meantime, would you still be able to pay your bills? Or would all of your joint assets be stuck?
I use cheques for larger-than-usual investment transactions.
Our vet, the LP company, and my computer guy don’t take plastic. Our bank is pretty low-tech and takes a check along with the slip from the payment book for our house payment. Sometimes we buy CDs at our little local concerts and write a check to the performer. We don’t generally walk around with a wallet full of cash for these purposes.
What else? Donations to charity (like last month when my friend was doing a Polar Plunge for Special Olympics; I sent him a check). Some of our 5K/10K race registrations. Any transaction where I’m out and about, they aren’t set up for plastic, and I don’t have the cash or want a record.
I will concede that I don’t carry a full book of checks in my wallet anymore; I tear off three at a time and tuck them in there. Otherwise it’s cash, debit card, or CC. (I like to have options.)
Mr. S is a bit of a Luddite and prefers not to use a debit card. He writes checks mostly, and carries very little cash. I make him carry a credit card for emergencies and gas.
I’m quite sure that part of why our approach to money management is so successful is because we’re so different. I like plastic, doing things online, and calculating to the penny. He prefers checks, and he balances his checkbook every couple of months if he thinks of it. I’d have to kill him if we had a joint account.
Basically all the routine monthly household bills come by autopay out of the joint checking account. We also each have separate checking accounts that our respective paychecks go into, and which we use for our respective daily expenses. Things like groceries, etc. are either paid by one of us via cash or debit from our separate checking accounts, or via our joint credit card. So basically we never take cash out of the joint account, and the only deductions are for joint monthly expenses (mortgage, utitilies, etc.), so it’s difficult to lose track. We each transfer chunks of money from our personal accounts into the joint account when we get paid.
So far it works pretty well.
I’m sort of in your boat. I rarely write checks anymore, and try to do everything online. I don’t even receive statements for most bills anymore as many companies prefer online transactions, which is fine by me as I no longer have to go out to buy stamps, and just about all of our bills are on autopay. I even put a stop to all my banks’ paper account statements; I don’t need them anymore as I reconcile online.
My wife and I don’t use credit cards; we have an American Express card that hasn’t been used in about a year. My wife used to have a couple of credit cards, but after a couple of, let’s call them incidents, I put a stop to that. Now if she wants something she doesn’t have the cash for, we discuss it first.
The Firebug’s day care isn’t set up to take electronic payment, so they get a check each Monday. Our cleaning lady - same deal, only every other Thursday. And it seems to be the best way to handle some big-ticket items: when we bought our most recent car, when we had our gutters replaced, ditto our heat pump.
We have separate accounts only because my wife gets a £2000 interest-free student overdraft while she’s studying.
Once she qualifies this summer we’ll send all the cash into our main joint account (which currently only I pay into). I tend to look after finances in terms of mortgages, savings etc, but day-to-day spending is carried out by whichever of us is available, and we both have debit cards to the joint account.
We will maintain my wife’s separate account but it’ll probably sit idle with a few ££ in it. In the future it might be useful to have an account which was in my wife’s name before we were married (e.g. insolvency).
Who writes cheques anymore?
I also forgot the important role of cheques in various tax write-off activities, particularly when receipts are impractical or difficult to get. When the government offerend tax credits for home improvements and renovations, often the best way to pay a contractor was by cheque and the most reliable way prove it was your cancelled cheque. When I was single and freelancing, I could claim a significant portion of my rent as a business expense for my home office. My cancelled cheques were my rent receipt. They still come in handy.
We pretty much co-mingle everything, but we each have our own small accounts that we can use for stuff that we want to buy for ourselves (music, movies, etc.).
True, when you accumulate more money you tend to accumulate accounts also.
We don’t actually own much - our Family Trust does. In California a lot of people set up trusts - I think because of state probate. My parents went to estate planning classes as a hobby when they moved here, and it turned out to have been very handy. So, I’m not sure if a suit against me would screw up the trust.
In any case, I don’t see that a very low probability event (I don’t have creditors) is worth totally complicating our finances. In any case I can’t conceive that splitting things up into little buckets is going to solve the problem except in the very short term. Plus, we are cash flow positive, and can live off my income without touching savings at all. I live near the Hayward fault - burying cash in my backyard in case of earthquake would probably be something I did before this.
If you read my original posts, we do also. We write checks from our checking to our investment account, and for bills that can’t be paid on-line. Though we have a mortgage with our bank, their on-line bill paying doesn’t allow you to pay more principal, so we even write a check for that. What we don’t do is to write checks at every Middlesex village and farm, so leaving the checkbook at home works great.
looking at location “Middle of nowhere” - that explains it. 
Around here checks are almost dead. I don’t go to our company cafeteria, much, but a bunch of us took an interview candidate last week, and everyone but me used credit cards even there.
I was referring to having to drag the checkbook around on errands. We went to on line payments only when we zipped off to Europe for 3 weeks, and wanted to pay our bills from there. I probably use more checks than average. But I see very few people paying by check at businesses.
I’m not too fond of debit cards myself. I only use them at Costco. Since we get money back, the credit card is the way to go. We’re putting our new floors on Discover - kaching!
Separate accounts make sense when there is some level of financial incompatibility. My wife and I are the same degree of anal about this, but if she was looser I’d be balancing the account every few weeks. Much better that than having her account get out of control.
One of our secrets is to hide $1,000 in our checking account and not include it in Quicken or the register. That way we have a cushion in case someone makes an adding mistake or forgets to enter something. We started this by accident, when I made a $1,000 mistake giving us more money that we thought we had, and we decided it was such a good idea we did it when we opened our new account.
FWIW, my folks manage their money pretty much like suranyi. There is only one checkbook. Dad takes care of all the bill paying and pays everything off each month. They use the credit card more than they used to (a lot more, once I explained “1% cash back”) but even when they didn’t, rarely was anyone out shopping simultaneously-but-not-together. They keep a huge cushion in the checking account.
Dad goes to the ATM once a week and gets out a lot of cash. He is always checking mom’s wallet to see that she has enough cash (which is sort of irrelevant due to the use of credit cards).
We got to take the window credit for last year, and the receipt from the contractor (and the form) was what we needed. We paid in chunks, so no one check would show it. My wife is a freelance writer, and she keeps a careful log of expenses in Quicken with receipts. Never needed a check. In any case you don’t even get canceled checks back anymore. I no longer even get images, though I think I can request them.
Our checking accounts are no-fee as long as we keep a $200 minimum balance. So we just write it out and forget about it (except when balancing, of course). Mr. S has this odd habit of telling me things like, “I’ve got $150 above the line.” To me the bold part is redundant; we’re not supposed to be counting that extra $200 anyway. But I think he includes it in his daily balance. I don’t.
Totally agree with this. No accounts, credit cards, even property ownership together. We split the bills and alternate grocery shopping. we don’t even have the same auto insurance carrier because we disagree on coverage. Each can save or spend the money the have as they see fit including buying a new car.
Never had a fight about money.
Fought about almost everything else, but never about money.
Depends on your account. We can see ours as PDFs, both front and back of the check, and print them out on a single page. All for free.
As for contractors, we did a home demolition/overhaul renovation on an investment property a couple of years ago and only a couple contractors provided really good paperwork. They were the ones from really big companies. Most of the independent contractors had crap paperwork. If you buy flooring from Home Depot, you’ll get nice paperwork. “Roger the Roofer” doesn’t take American Express and his paperwork is a generic handwritten receipt. Even if we had the right paperwork, we’d still staple a printout of the check to it to make sure everything on paper matched what we paid when we did all of our taxes.
ETA: But running around writing checks for regular day-to-day stuff like groceries is definitely extremely rare around here. Never done it.
Wow. I have a lot of respect for someone whose bank error is actually in their favor. Mine always went the other way–strange, right? Every single time.
We have shared and separate accounts for several very good reasons.
- Vastly different styles of banking philosophy. If I see it in my checking account, I’m going to spend it. On the flip side, I actually remember to pay regularly occuring bills. Husband is a save-a-holic, but when he had to pay the power bill every month (which couldn’t be auto-drafted) we had a few… unexpected candlelight dinners. :rolleyes:
So, I keep my checking account balance as close to zero as I can. I worked out how much the bills are every month, tack on a little grace money, and have all the excess from my paycheck drafted off to different accounts where I don’t see it. I have about 8 bank accounts in 4 different banks. He keeps his savings and checkings linked, all with one bank, and likes to see everything upfront. For bills, I handle all the bills that require face-time to pay, and he handles everything that can be autodrafted.
-
Vastly different income levels. This one’s more a personal thing. He doesn’t give a shit that he makes more than 4 times what I do, but it bugs ME. So there are some bills that are “MINE, goddamnit, because I am contributing to this household so there!” and even though he could pay them, and take a lesser hit of his paycheck, I pay it because it’s important to me to see my work efforts going towards something tangible for the household. Again, if everything went into the same “pot” I wouldn’t have the emotional kick of feeling like my work is contributing tangibly to our lives, because my contributions would be utterly swallowed by his.
-
Pre-existing obligations/debts. His family bought him a car and he’s still paying them for it. I have school debts. Neither of those things need to be joint, because they are our own personal financial issues, and we both feel like we need to stay personally accountable for our own pre-married crap. Likewise, I have some positive things that are mine from before marriage, and if I die, he gets them, but they are mine until then. Same with him.
Just because you marry someone doesn’t mean that you become them. I am an individual, who happens to be married to another individual. Having individual things doesn’t make us less married.
Lastly, most of our banking is done online or by phone, and as long as you have the proper passcodes and banking information (which we do) you can access someone else’s account all day long even if your name isn’t on it. You think my computer notices that I don’t have a y chromosome and warns his bank when I’m checking his interest for our taxes?
This bears repeating. Hell, I kept my own name when we got married. I suppose that’s fodder for a whole 'nother thread about how we’re not committed enough and there must be something wrong with us. 
Surely the real answer is that each married couple should do what’s best for them and neither shared nor separate finances are better?
Having shared finances doesn’t mean you’re not individuals.
Having separate finances doesn’t mean you don’t trust each other.