Recently an interesting thread popped up in the forums about joint and separate accounts. It seems that most people mentioned they had joint accounts. For Linda and I, we discovered that even though we had joint accounts, we still needed to have some amount of cash that was separate. We basically created a weekly “allowance” for each of us, that was our money to spend on ourselves for the week.
Since money issues are the number one reason for divorce in the U.S. I thought this would be a topic worth discussing and seeing how the readers handle it.
Feel free to respond to any of the questions below in the comments section…
- Do you and your spouse have joint accounts?
- Do you have any cash set aside for individual use?
- Have you learned any lessons the “hard way” with your finances in marriage?
FTC Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above may be affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, we will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, we only recommend products or services we use personally and/or believe will add value to readers. Read more here.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
All of our accounts are joint (as are loans, etc.)
We’ve learned that everything that has to do with money should be out in the open. The fewer surprises the better.
Individual “free” spending is a good idea too.
That’s my take!
Every marriage needs a certain amount of space for breathing, this is particularly true when it comes to finances. You can’t have a spouse that questions every purchase you make and you doing the same to him or her. That is the recipe for marital disaster.
My husband and I have two checking accounts. Both are joint,on one he is the primary “owner” and on the other I am the primary. His paycheck is deposited to his account and he pays the bills from it. He transfers cash to my account every paycheck for me to use however I want. (I don’t work outside the home). We talk frequently about our finances. We’ve been using this system for years and find it really works for us.
We have joint accounts. We also get a certain amount of cash each payday that we call “Spending Money” that we can spend or save however we choose.
I do like Mary’s setup mentioned above, that would solve my DW’s complaint that she can’t buy me any gifts without me seeing where, when and how much she spent
This is funny, I actually started a series on my website about money & marriage. I figure February is a month we kinda associate with romance and love because of valentines day, so I thought I would incorporate money into the equation.
http://www.christianmoneymountain.com/2009/02/marriage-money.html
My wife and I have a joint account, but then we budget so much a month for personal spending. Its worked out well for us so far. I believe you can run into trouble when you have separate accounts.
We have two separate checking accounts. She pays specific bills out of hers. I pay specific ones out of mine. We talk about upcoming expenses and try to work together on those. I do most of the planning and creating the budget.
My husband is in heaven now, but we used to have all joint accounts and gave ourselves a monthly allowance. It was built into our budget. I was primarily responsible to pay our bills, but we went over our budget together each month and made decisions together on any discretionary spending. I miss the accountability, but enjoy being a part of this group to help me in that area. I still give myself an allowance each payday.
This is so funny. My husband who manages our accounts agreed that we should have 1 joint and he gave me a personal checking acct for biweekly allowances for my personal use and won’t question my spending. This has worked out so well for us!
Since we both work and contribute our paychecks go into a joint acct for everything else and he gives me an allowance every other week when my paycheck comes in. The great part of this is, if we go under budget for the week he occasional extra allowances for my personal use that he transfers to my personal checking. This definitely worked for us and – feel is fair without breaking our budget.
What Bob’s not saying in this post is that he had to give me my own spending money because if it was all in one big pot I’d spend all of our money! LOL!
Linda that is my exact point! That is exactly why my husband did that. He’s so anal and meticulous when it comes to our finances. He has excel spreadsheets that he made for himself and he keeps into an account of every PENNY. So because I’m not like him, he did the separate personal account for that exact same reason! He was worried I’d spend our joint account away! Hahah.
well, in my case, it’s actually true! he he! : )
When we first got married, we were both working and established an agreement of ‘yours mine and ours’. We established a budget and then put equal amounts of our salary into the ‘ours’ account to meet our bugetary expenses – this served us well for a number of years.
Unfortunately, at some point in time, my wife decided this was no longer acceptable – and I became the only one putting funds into the joint account. This was followed by her buying groceries (for our neighbor) out of the joint account then getting paid cash by the neighbor (but never putting money back into the joint account). In the corporate world, this would be called embezzlement.
It came as a suprise to her when I closed the joint account. I figure if I’m going to be responsible for payng all of our bills (even though she is still working), I don’t need to keep up with two accounts. She now funds the groceries from her pay and I pay for everything else. And now that we have teenagers, she’s grousing about how much groceries are — but that is her problem — she chose to abuse the system, I won’t reward her for this abuse of my trust.
I have only been married for 3 months now so I am no expert but I think we have the best system. My goal was for each of us to be able to make sure that we are being wise with our money (not incurring fees, interest or debt and hitting our goals). I think it is critical that each person has visibility to the others spending and that each couple should come up with and agree to a spending/savings plan together and contribute to it.
We have a joint checking account and separate credit cards (to maintain our own credit ratings. We pay them off each month). Each of our paychecks go into our joint checking account and we use our credit cards for almost every purchase. We have a budget setup which includes everything: expenses, savings, giving, and our “fun money” that each of us can use for whatever we want.
We use mint.com to maintain our budget. We track all of our purchases/transactions from all of our savings, checking and credit accounts. We assign each transaction to the different categories in our budget to make sure we are staying on track.
My bf and i have been dating 2 1/2 years and both share strong Christian values and beliefs. we are talking more and more seriously about marriage and the first major red flag came up when he said he had a problem with joint accounts because he didnt want his hard earned money to get spent on my things-like student loans. we are both great with money and have no problems with giving to our church and spending on each other but this took me by surprise and idk what to make of it. i dont want to marry someone who doesnt care about me enough to provide because he loves his money more than me.
Not only do we have joint finances, we have never even had a formal written budget. While some may say that is a recipe for disaster, here is my take on it.
My wife and I recently went to a financial planner. We hope to retire in five years, and were just checking that everything is set up correctly. On the way home we were talking about our finances and realized that we have never had a budget. We have never written a formal plan of any sort. When we were first married we lived overseas earning about $300 a month each. At that time we talked through every purchase. As a special treat at Christmas, I bought her a $4 package of cheese, and to judge by her reaction, it could have cost $1,000.
Since then things have really turned around financially. I recently needed a new car as the old one was approaching 350,000 km and more and more things were failing. We chatted briefly about our budget range and I went out and bought a used one for $16,000 cash.
It was then I realized why we have never had a formal budget of any kind. We do not need one. We are financially in tune and have the same outlook and views on money. When a goal comes up, like saving for the down payment on our first house, we just both buckled down and saved. We grocery shop together and just seem to know when an item is too much or when to treat ourselves. Our general rule these days is that if it is less than $100 there is no need to ask, and when it is more, we will chat about it on our nightly walks, or over our weekend game of Scrabble. (That said, we have never had any personal allowance or separate bank accounts.)
A few months ago we finally bought a couch for our family room. The old one was nearly 20 years old, but the main problem was that I could no longer fix the leg that our enthusiastic teenagers seems to keep breaking by roughhousing on it. I say finally, not because of the 20 years, but because of the months we spent looking – it may have been over a year. We live in a large metropolitan area and have access to a huge variety of furniture stores. Countless nights have been spent shopping around but we could never find what we were looking for.
Patiently we resigned ourselves to be on the lookout for what we wanted and/or change our wants and price range. In the end we found exactly what we were looking for. It was about twice what we had wanted to pay, but we agreed that given its quality and materials, we would splurge. So far it has been everything we expected.
So if you are both on the same financial page, skip the formal budgeting process and forget about his and her money. We learned over time that by talking about purchases and personal values, you can have a successful financial future. What we find these days is that we are more and more encouraging each other to spend on ourselves. I commute a 1,000 km a week, but it was her idea to go for a more upscale used car. She has a good job in a major downtown office, but I seem to be the one pushing her to spend more on her clothes to look the part of a successful manager.
While our retirement will not quite be the classic ‘freedom 55’ it will be pretty darn close. We will be retiring in our late 50’s with a solid income stream that should allow us to see the world and never have to work again. It has taken 30 odd years of financial discipline, but we have never needed a written budget to make it happen.
My wife and I had a long discussion tonight and she want us to have a joint account. But I’m on a fixed income and it goes directly to my personal account to use to pay bills, etc. But she believes it would benefit because we don’t have anything together. We have been married 14 months. I believe that you do what you need to do to take care of bills and such. I would pay certain bills, and she pays certain bills out of each separate accounts. After I told her that I’m not doing the joint account, she got so mad at me that she won’t talk to me. Now I’m in the dogghouse, and my marriage is on the rocks. What should I do about this situation? Reply back.
Bobby,
The line about “you do what you need to do” is all well and good when your single, but you decided she was worth marrying, that means she is worth sharing your life with, which is much bigger than money, once you tie the knot it “should” become OUR money, not your money and my money, my account and your account, my bills and your bills, as long as this attitude of separation exists then you are really just roommates living together, in my opinion. Why not join the accounts, is there a trust issue?
My parents were together for over 20 years and they never had a account together. If it worked for them , then it should work for us.
For some couples it works, in your case it appears this is not the best solution from your wife’s point of view.
This may sound harsh, but only based on the few short sentences you have written…If you are expecting you wife to be just like your mother, you may have other, bigger marriage issues than joint checking accounts.
Good luck Bobby!
Your reply was more than harsh, it was insulting to me. You don’t even know me like that. If I wanted my mother, then I would have married my mother. I was saying that it happened to them, nothing more than that. My marriage is on the rocks, (so what) its good to know that I put my business on this site for the WRONG reasons.
Bobby, I sincerely apologize. You are correct, I don’t know you and shouldn’t have been so judgmental based only on 2 comments.
Here is what I should have said:
Marriage is about union, two people coming together as one family unit. Which in my opinion, includes the finances. Having separate accounts, where each one of you “do what you need to do” sounds like a lot of individualism, separation, and altogether divided situation. This is my opinion.
I have a very close friend who has 2 checking accounts, so I asked him how they make it work. The accounts they have are not his account and her account though. One account is there bill pay account, where all household, recurring bills are paid, while the other one is pretty much their disposable income where they pull some out for savings, put some into accumulation funds, etc.
Maybe something like this would work in your situation. At any rate, I believe you need to sit down and express to your wife how much you love her, and that your reluctance to join accounts has nothing to do with your relationship, it just caught you by surprise and wasn’t how you parents handled money. Ask her what her concerns are, what’s her motivation for joining the accounts, and how she purposes that you handle financial decisions together as a couple. If you want to get your marriage off the rocks, you will need to address her concerns and worries.
I hope this was a much better reply and again I sincerely apologize for my rash and irresponsible previous reply.
My husband and I have been together 5 years, we have separate accounts and money is not an issue! We split bills and everything that is for both of us. When it comes to buying things that I want then I spend my money, if he wants something then he spends his money. It has never been a problem, we never agreed on doing it like this but it works out great!
I’m engaged to be married and recently some of our friends mentioned we should have a joint account because it’s biblical. From what I’ve read, I disagreed. I get the union represented in marriage, but I’m pretty adamant about keeping separate accounts.
My fiancee, whom I dearly love, isn’t so smart with money, has bad credit, and doesn’t care much for saving, quickly jumped on the idea and feels it’s a slap in the face that I want to maintain separate accounts – She works for my business and I pay her as her sole source of income.
I, on the other hand, am smart with money, save relentlessly, and feel it is my huge responsibility to be able to provide for her for the long term (particularly because my parents divorced, citing $$ as a main reason) and I’m determined that that will never be the case for us.
Please reply! I’d love your input!
Me and the wife have decided to keep separate accounts but we work together constantly in personal finance and save independently but with one goal in mind.
Dwight Anthony
We have two joint accounts. One for bills and one for expenses. Then we each have a separate checking account. Mostly my husband saves his money and I spend mine. I am working on managing my personal spending money better. We talk about it and he helps me. He is a great saver. We work together. We really do not have a “formal” budget. We just have a rule to have “money at the end of the month.” Mostly it goes to investing. We also keep a prioritized list of “nice-to-haves” so that when we are blessed enough to have a “bonus”, we know exactly what we will use it on.
{ 1 trackback }