Odinsown

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

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…

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.

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.

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).