Sharing a bank account with your spouse

[sounderella]

Awesome! Thanks so much for all the input! I'm going to share all of these ideas with hubby and we'll fix this situation.

[graceful]

I didn't say what my wife and I do.

My wife doesn't touch the bank account. She doesn't go to the ATM. She doesn't use a debit card. Almost everything is paid by credit. Whenever she needs cash, I give it to her. The only time she ever directly accesses our account is when she writes a check, usually for our daughter's school or youth group events, and those get recorded right away in the checkbook register.

This works very, very well for us and has for 18 years now.

This is exactly our system for the last 14 year - except that DH never even writes any checks. If he needs something paid by check, he asks me to do it.

He uses cash and the credit card exclusively. As for the cash, I make sure he has some every time he goes out the door. Some weeks he uses more and others less. He's never a big cash spender so there is never a limit on how much I give him a week. It is whatever he needs. Many weeks, he comes home on Friday with the same $40 I gave him on Monday.

[tdls17]

It's your call; but if you have a good relationship, you can stick with joint accounts. The trick is to pay yourselves "first", before you pay the bills and go shopping.

Come payday, we take 10% and save/invest it. This money doesn't get touched.

Trying to invest/save "after" bills, shopping doesn't usually work in that there's no money left afterwards..

Denise

[TheStreetCeo]

Slug and I have the same approach. My wife and I have 3 checking accounts. One account is where my paycheck goes into and the other two are our spending accounts. Once a month I transfer our spending money to each of our checking accounts and make our savings deposit and that fixes everything.

[strigiformes]

My husband and I have separate finances. His are extremely complicated compared to mine, so I won't even go into that here. Basically, it's his job to make the money and it's my job (literally - I get paid to do it) to manage everything for him/his business, myself, and the household. It's much easier in our situation for only one person to handle the day-to-day monitoring of the finances.

We each pay a portion of the monthly expenses from our own accounts based on our income. I 'give' myself a monthly spending allowance that I don't deviate from (which I also did before I got married). My husband is not big on shopping, and usually has me buy what he wants using his money (or he reimburses me). So there's never any issue with one of us not knowing what the other is spending.


I like the above idea of having three accounts. A percentage of each person's income goes to one account to cover the household expenses, and each person has control of his/her own account for 'fun money'. That should keep everything nice and simple, and eliminate the need to worry about what the other person is spending. Obviously, you'd have to be able to agree in advance about how much each person will have to spend and how much each needs to contribute to the communal pot. But if you can do that, it sounds like a good solution.

[kobe008]

I really want to do this but how is it decided which account to use? Bills out of the join account I get that, but how about groceries and gas? We each have our own vehicle so maybe gas out of our individual accounts? For groceries would it be out of the main account, but eating out comes from the individual accounts? How about clothes? Kids clothes out of joint account but personal clothes out of individual accounts?

Also I have no idea how to bring this up to my wife cause i dont think she will like the idea. Trouble is that i feel she spends way more than i do and my account will end up always having money in it while hers will be empty.

[Angio333]

MY wife and I share the checking account. I am the one in charge of making sure all of the bills are paid out of that account. we have to "ask" each other before using the debit card except for an emergency. we use cash for most non Bill related ppurchases, etc

[ktmarvels]

Also I have no idea how to bring this up to my wife cause i dont think she will like the idea. Trouble is that i feel she spends way more than i do and my account will end up always having money in it while hers will be empty.

There are a couple of solutions for this. #1: Give her more money. Just because you guys are financial partners doesn't mean it has to be an even 50/50 split. DH and I don't separate our finances, but I'm almost certain I spend more than him.

Option #2: Let her account be empty. Assuming she won't go behind your back and open/run up a bunch of credit card debt, letting her struggle with budgeting and finances aren't a bad idea.

While I think the "tough love" I suggest in option 2 is ok, I would make sure both of you are both on board with this idea. Unilateral decisions in finances often cause a lot of problems in a relationship.

[elessar78]

My wife and I each have an individual account and a joint account. Our indiv. paychecks go into our individual accounts and I transfer her paycheck into my account when it's deposited. I handle the finances for the family, so all the bills get paid from my account and I just give her money as she requests it.

At that point, money I give her is her responsibility and she doesn't have to necessarily account for how she spends it. But she is great about telling me if she is going to buy something that is more than just the routine stuff.

Every Friday or Saturday, I give her a quick rundown of our money situation. How much we have, any unusual upcoming expenses, how much we can spend, and whether we can be "relaxed" with our expenditures or have to be more conservative.

Our joint account was really a vestigial tail. When we first got married, we tried to do the joint account thing and paid for bills and other things but it proved too cumbersome for various reasons. So we just turned my individual account into the defacto joint account. Although nowadays the "JA" is seeing more activity, because my wife has a job where she get's reimbursed for work expenses. So we deposit her reimbursement checks in there and it operates as a "work fund" for her job. It keeps our personal expenses separate from her work expenses.

When it comes to personal finance, I like to employ the K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle. There's no one true way for a couple to deal with finances, just do whatever method gives you an accurate, organized picture of a) how much money you have and b) how much is going out in a given period. And the key is for BOTH to know this information.

[Caoineag]

We do cash allowances in my house. Only one checking account which usually has a decent chunk of change sitting in it. One time expenses tend to go on the credit card. We used to put everything on the credit card and just pay it off but the cash gives you a sense that you should slow down or come up with more money when you get low. I will also tell my husband (since I take care of the finances) when we are lower than usual. Not because he is a big spender, but because he prefers to pay cash and I generally don't care if its cash or credit as long as it is paid in full. Only reason to use the credit card at all is cash flow and rebates.

It doesn't look very simple but so far of everything we have tried, this works best. No receipts, no guessing at how much was spent until it finally shows up on the credit card, etc. Only requires me to balance the books once per month (which I do to see the long term impact on our finances, not to keep afloat month to month).

[elessar78]

One reason I would consider trying to do the credit card thing again is that some cards give you a breakdown in spending categories. I'm a bit of stat geek and I like to be able to analyze where my money is going. Yes, I've done it long hand before but it's a bit tedious to carry around a little notebook or do it everytime I get home.

[glock35ipsc]

We have 4 checking accounts all at the same bank: mine, hers, joint, and medical.

Both incomes get deposited into the joint account. From there, we pay utilities, insurance, cell phones, food, clothes, family fun stuff, etc. The basic family necessities. Most everything that gets paid out of that account is on auto-debit. IRA and other investment contributions are also on auto-debit from this account.

From the joint account, we transfer to each of our checking accounts our blow money and gas money. We budget, so this amount is always included in the budget, and we just transfer our budgeted amounts to our individual accounts. From there, we can get cash from the bank or ATM, or use the debit card for purchases.

The medical account is simple a checking account we set up that gets money sent to it every month. It is our own "medical savings account". We use this only for doctors visits, prescriptions, braces, etc. Anything medical.

We both control the budget, not just one of us. So we both know where all the dollars are going to go. We each have budgeted amounts for our weekly blow money and our gas money. We are to the point now that we just do one transfer a month to cover our personal needs.

This has worked very well for us, especially when she works mids or worse, swings. When she is on swing shift I might not see her for 4-5 days straight. We each have $$ in our accounts, so we don't have to worry about going over.

[thekid]

I don't even have a joint acount with my wife. We have a joint credit card for household expenses. End of the month, detailled bill comes in and we both pay half.

Of course, this works well because we both agree on the other's household spending. When one wants to buy something more big ticket or out of left field (most often me), I'll discuss it first and if she isn't on board, I simply put it on my own card.

It's worked well for us to seperate personal from communal pending like this. This of course supposes a dual income home and a normal amount of trust/responsibility.

[cptacek]

For those of you who have individual accounts...is your spouse authorized at the bank to access this money? Are you saying there is no legal way for your spouse to get "your" money or is it just each of you access different banks to get the money, but you could if you needed to?

What I am worried about is if one of you is incapacitated in any way, not only does the other person have to deal with your incapacitation, but also has to worry that half the mortgage isn't paid because half comes out of your account and they can't access it.

[thekid]

For those of you who have individual accounts...is your spouse authorized at the bank to access this money? Are you saying there is no legal way for your spouse to get "your" money or is it just each of you access different banks to get the money, but you could if you needed to?

What I am worried about is if one of you is incapacitated in any way, not only does the other person have to deal with your incapacitation, but also has to worry that half the mortgage isn't paid because half comes out of your account and they can't access it.

We both have procurements on each other's accounts and a general notarized procurement in case of disability. We just don't use them.