Feb 28 2008
Relationship finances, joint or separate?
We own a house, we have a daughter and our finances are still almost entirely separated.
Sure, we have some of each others credit cards programmed into our accounts for ease of payment, but we don’t have direct access to each others money, and there is no joint account. We manage our own money, split the bills and maintain our own accounts.
Why is this?
Some of it’s habit, a good portion is expedience, but truth be told the bulk of it is adherence to the principle “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.“. The arrangement we have at present works fine. We looked into a joint account, but hit some stumbling blocks early on. Lisa deals with one of the “big” banks I despise, and I deal with a small credit union. Neither of our employers payroll departments can direct a percentage of our paycheques to a joint account and the remainder to our personal accounts (which would have been optimal), and finally it was just too much effort to implement any of the “compromise” options when, as I said before, the present arrangment works fine.
What sort of arrangements do you have with your spouse/partner/hamster/imaginary friend?
John and I have been dating for nearly 5 years and living together for 4. We discussed finances early on in our relationship and have pretty much stuck to our initial plan. We each have separate individual accounts, and one joint account. We are at the same bank, so it’s really easy to transfer money from one account into the joint one and so on. However, we rarely even do that, because our deal is that he pays the mortgage, and I pay living expenses. It works out pretty evenly and we like it that way.
I give all of my money to her and she lets me live inside if I shower regularly. If I need something, she’ll approve the funds, unless it’s something like a smack upside the head, in which case she’ll do it herself.
Greg: +1, buff said
I thump my imaginary friend over the head and steal her lunch.
Actually I’m a Dave Ramsey Devotee, and if I recall correctly he’s never had a problem with the idea of separate checking accounts. in fact I think he’s had to council far MORE problems caused by joint accounts which are not militarily watched by both parties. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
We do the joint account thing but with a twist. We have a spending account (food, smokes, gas etc), a bill account and a spare account (acts like a savings). Money that gets transfered to the bill account stays there, it’s a one way street.
Purchases are fair game as long as bills are paid and we have food & gas.
I agree, if it works, don’t mess with it!
Joint account? Is that, like, for wacky weed?
+1 Greg.
The joint thing has always worked well for us.
If I need something, I buy it, it’s rarely a problem.
I do how ever run a “Side job slush fund”.
Doing side jobs keeps just enough cash in the safe to keep me in Boom-Sticks.
We have both our own accounts and a shared account for bills and such. She handles the bills, because I suck with money and just don’t have the patients to deal with them. It works ouit just fine, I keep my sanity and the bills get paid on time.
In England we had our own accts and a joint acct for bills/living expenses. At the time, I wasn’t ready to hand over full access to ‘my money’. In Australia it was much simplier to have one joint acct. Here, we have a joint acct into which both our pays go and all our bills come out of. A portion also goes each week to our individual RRSPs and our joint savings acct. It forces us to save and pay our bills on time. Whatever works at the time really is what matters. I’ve friends who had separate accts that didn’t work. Each was responsible for certain bills only once she’d pay her share, making less money than he did, she didn’t have any money left over, while he could afford golfing holidays with his mates. She ended up taking on part time jobs just to have some spending money. Needless to say, the relationship didn’t last.
BTW: There’s a new spin off show from Life on Mars called Ashes to Ashes and there’s an american version of Life on Mars now in the works.
Kit: Sounds amicable enough. Lisa and I have a similar arrangement. I pay the mortgage and she pays the daycare (as irritating as it sounds, they cost about the same right now), the rest of the “fixed” expenses are split roughly down the middle.
Greg: Sounds fair, but it seems to work as even with the entire brood you guys are not living in a cardboard box.
-GRIN-
Theodore: Ibid
Thomas: Hehe, makes sense to me. Who want’s to scrutinize an account like that?
Red: I like the hybrid joint account arrangement with money allocated to specific areas. Seems a lot more regimented than paying everything out of one account.
Matti: Uh, no… that’d be against the law and stuff.
Piet: My fundamental problem with the joint account is this. I keep a running tab of my credit card and bank balances in my head. Each purchase updates this mental register (which I’ve found is fairly accurate). If two people are accessing the account/credit card/whatever then I quickly lose track of whats what.
I’m a big believer in the “slush fund”, if it wasn’t for my personal slush fund I’m certain I’d have dipped into “our” savings account that I look after.
Michael: That sounds like a good arrangement too. I’ll admit that the only appeal a joint account held for me had was as a sort of general bill payment holding fund into which we could transfer money and then pay bills from.
Susie: Hey Stranger!
Again, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Sounds like you guys have been evolving your own system for a while now, no?
-GRIN-
Our system has evolved a little bit, but then so have we. When we first started dating I was a paycheque-paycheque person. The last day before payday would consistently find me short on money. I just spent what was in my chequing account, trying to leave enough for the bills I knew were coming out.
When Jilly was born it was clear this system wasn’t going to work, particularly once the house was purchased. So I started transfering $25 or $50 into my savings account each paycheque. Trying to build up one mortgage payment, and then two, and then three and then one months worth of living expenses.
I also have two slush funds where I’m transfering the money I would have spent on savings (and Jillys trust fund where I try to transfer a few bucks every time I think I have a little bit of a surplus).
It takes a while (and buying PS3s depletes funds a bit), but it’s habit and one I’m not looking to “kick”.
As for joint accounts. Lisa and I shared one of her credit cards a while back, and receiving the bill was always a source of irritation as neither was expecting a bill as high as it inevitably was (with each of us only keeping track of our own expenditures). We’ve since cancelled that and maintain our own cards (although we do pay each others bills when needed).
Savings!!?!?!? I wish.
We have a few accounts not accessible from our debit card, so we can hide money from ourselves in there and divy things up to pay bills and what-not. We only keep enough for day-to-day expenses and the odd auto-withdrawal bill payment. Otherwise every last cent is usually spoken for in some spread-sheet that Brenda keeps going, as we’re only on my income. I look at it once in a while, but that only screws with her system, which is far superior to anything I’d had on my own. I vaguely try to keep a running tab, but if the taxes come out and they’d re-assessed, the whole total goes wonky.
Are you kidding? I live in Surrey. A cardboard box in Surrey is currently running over $250,000…and that’s the down payment! I wish I could afford a cardboard box!
In all seriousness, money is really Traci’s domain. I’m good at spending it, actually better than she is. She’s good at making it and saving it, but with big purchases, she suffers from a combination of two problems:
First, big expenditures make her sweat. When we bought our house, as we signed the documents, I made the off-hand comment “Well, it’s not every day I go a quarter of a million dollars into debt”. It nearly sewered the deal, as she freaked out at that idea. Some calming, soothing noises were made and she signed, with Greg remembering that we shouldn’t joke like that.
Second, she’s good at saving money and reducing costs, but she often goes a tad too far. I firmly believe that if you want quality, you have to expect to pay a bit more. She’ll go for the cheapest, lowest quality, third world knock-off advertised as “Just as good, half the price and unlike our competitors product, it glows in the dark!” or “Made in the finest sweatshops inside the historic Iron Curtain”. She’ll end up buying three of whatever as they junk off, while it would have been cheaper to just buy one really good one. She and I are really opposites on this, so we come to a balance on it.
I’m in the same boat as Greg!! I never seem to have much money even though I’m the breadwinner. The wife deals with all of that!! Guess that’s the only way we’ll ever get any investment properties.
Our finances are… complicated. We each have our own savings and checking accounts, and then a combined savings account… We each have our own IRA and investment accounts, and then a combined CD. We do have a joint credit card, though.
Either way, it is rather moot – Better Half has the access numbers, IDs, codes, and PINs for all of my accounts, and if I make anything outside of a normal purchase without telling her, it cannot last for more than a day without a few questions thrown my way.
In the end, it is probably better that way – I suck at saving/budgeting, while she is not tremendous at spending. Works out relatively well…
hmmm.
2 checking accounts at Credit Union – mine and ours
1 checking account at major crappy bank – his
2 regular savings at Credit Union – mine and his
1 Money Market account at Credit Union – mine
I am also joint on:
a) my Brother’s checking
2) my Mother’s checking AND Savings
I look at the accounts near daily. I’m just that anal.
N
I say; ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. You got something that works.
Odinsown