I'm kind of wondering this because my own parents are not the best example of a typical married couple, and my aunt and her husband's marriage is so tumultuous that they don't share finances at all. Do most married couples have joint bank accounts and just pay bills out of that? Do they each make their own car payments, or split the mortgage payment between the two of them? Does this create a strain when one spouse makes more than the other?
Well I think its different for everyone. We have a two joint accounts and then each have our own separate account. One joint accout is checking for bills, the other is for family savings and then we have our own savings accounts for stuff. My parents say you should always have your own accounts. Right now its works where bills are paid from my check that I put into the joint checking (I make more) and her check is put into the joint savings. We each take a piece of our own checks for our personal savings account and stupid spending. Pretty much everything is done together financially. it just works out best for us that way. We we go out we use the joint checking mostly. Occasionally she or I like to pay form our own cash, but...i dunno. My dad and his wife have a joint checking and then separate savings. she controls the bills and just gives him cash out of his check each week. He likes it like that.
I don't know how everybody else does it, but we have one joint bank account with two "sub-accounts". So I have my own savings, checking and line-of-credit, as does he. But both of us have the ability to move money between the accounts. We've worked out what my "share" of the monthly bills is, so on bill-paying day, he moves that amount from my account to his, and then he pays all the bills. (Most of them are set to pay automatically, though.) Whatever's left is technically ours to do with as we see fit. But if either of us are going to make a substantial purchase, we usually discuss it with the other. "I'd like to get this thing - is the budget OK with that?" The only drawback is buying him presents. I can't buy anything without it showing up on the account. (He looks over the credit card bills as well.) So I have to either take out cash and use that, or buy a Visa gift card and use that. Lex
It depends on a number of factors, especially the amount of money each partner makes, personal preference/abilities, etc. If one partner makes significantly more money, people will often work out a proportional system to pay expenses. For example, if I make 50k and my [hypothetical...] wife makes 100k, she'll pay twice as much as I do. Electric bill is 300 bucks? I'll pay 100, she'll pay 200. If the partners earn roughly the same amount, they can assign certain bills to each other, making sure that it equals out. Or perhaps have a shared account from which they take money to pay bills as needed. I've also heard of some couples where the man's salary is used to pay all living expenses, while the woman's goes directly into savings. That could work if one salary is enough to live on. Most important is that both partners are actively involved in the finances. I'm sure some couples manage fine with one person dealing with the money issues, but I've seen what can happen when that person is incompetent and/or irresponsible. It's not pretty. At all. So yeah, communication is key. I've taken a class on personal finance in university, it was one of the best investments of my life. I would recommend everyone to take such a class.
Lol I wasn't referring to you. I've just seen it in a male/female marriage context where the man has a full-time, relatively well-paying job and the wife works say, a part-time job, and takes care of the kids for the rest of the time. So while she wouldn't make nearly enough to live on, it's still a substantial amount if she puts some away, invests some, or whatever. Money grows (err, well, very slowly these days, but still lol)!! EDIT: Oh, now I understand why you posted this, lol I hadn't even noticed that part of your initial post where you say that's what you do. I had heard about this elsewhere.
This is another thing I've been thinking about in reminding myself that getting married isn't the nirvana so many people think it is. For the record, we're not even going to say the M-word until after graduation, and probably until after we've gotten our careers started and have gotten rooted wherever we decide to live. It amazes me when so many of these young couples in college get married just based on chemicals and then do the planning as they go. A friend of the family's son did that while he was in seminary in Kentucky. Rich and Kathy are still married 11 years and 2 kids later, but I've always thought that it's still a better idea to do what my parents did-get married after you're done with school and have a plan and your roots sunk a bit.
Sure, think about what you're doing before you do it. However, don't push off getting married forever (assuming you're in a relationship), because when you're just cohabiting with someone, you have few rights in terms of inheritance, transfer of ownership of things like homes if your partner dies, etc. Marriage has huge legal benefits which people like to ignore, causing themselves much avoidable grief.
We have three accounts. One joint and one sub-account each. We are secondary on each others sub accounts. The joint is for paying bills and household expenses. She saves for vacations and pays for her college out of that. The third one is for savings only, that is mine. She does not know I am saving for a car out of it for her, she really needs a new one.
Well I'm not married, but my girlfriend and i at first had a shared account only. But that didn't work out. So now we have a different arrangement. I have a personal account, she has a personal account and we have a joint account to pay joint bills.
I'm not sure if there's a standard, but I would think it'd be best to have one joint account for active use, a separate account each for individual purchases, and an account for savings (be it a trust for education, inheritance or something else.) The joint accounts would ideally need both partners to agree to withdraw to prevent abuse of the collective funds. I'd also think complete transparency and equal accessibility of all household finances would be necessary; I've seen too many cases where either by mutual mismanagement or individual incompetence/greed a couple's finances go badly. My parents essentially have the accounts I said, but they don't have to mutually consent to withdrawals to the collective accounts, which is not good.
As far as I know, my parents just have a joint account, plus a joint savings account. Money earned goes in, money spent goes out. They each have a debit and credit card linked tot the same account.
My partner and I both use the same bank. We each have our own checking and savings accounts and handle our individual finances individually. We also maintain a joint savings account that is basically just used as a pass through account for transferring funds to each other. Each month I transfer funds into the joint account to cover my portion of the bills (mortgage, car payments if we're doing those, utilities, whatever) and he transfers it into his checking or savings account to pay things. My partner has better credit than most countries so most of the bills are in his name and he has virtually everything set up to just autopay. I have most of my individual bills set up to either autopay or I pay them online each month. We both have separate retirement accounts, although we use the same financial adviser and have each other listed as beneficiaries on things and such. In terms of purchasing things, we tend to either alternate (mostly paying for meals) or one of us will pay for a major item and the cost is split between us, either by me adding my half of the monthly payment into what I transfer each month or subtracting his half from what I transfer each month. And of course we also individually buy whatever individual stuff strikes our fancy (Me - books for my Kindle, Him - Artwork and music mostly). Overall it works very well. Todd
I don't know if this technically applies to me, because the state we lived in same sex marriage isn't legal, but we were going to get married when we could. We lived together and had an exclusive relationship for seven years. For the first four, we had separate accounts and jointly contributed to the bills. We were both in college at the time. After graduation, we got a joint account to use to pay the bills, still had separate personal account. She made a little more money than I did, but not a great amount.
When my husband I first moved in together we tried the separate money/split the bills thing. He complained constantly because he was so broke all the time. He made more money than I did but we were splitting the bills evenly so I wanted to crack him over the head with something heavy and sharp a few times while he was moaning and I had way less money than he did. One month when he was complaining because he was only going to have a hundred bucks left out of his week's pay and I was looking at being nearly broke I just snapped and said "here, you do it." I handed him my paycheck, the grocery list and a pile of bills. Since he had no clue of what to do he just shuffled crap around for a couple hours and finally gave up. Since then he has handed me his pay checks and told me "let me know if I have anything left." LOL Now we have two joint accounts. One is where our money goes in and we pay most the bills from. The other is for online accounts so if anything gets hacked the main money is separate and less likely to get hit. He also came with his father's warning ingrained in his head "NEVER LET A WOMAN TOUCH YOUR WALLET!" That did not last long either. He kept losing it when he was running late for work. One time I found it while he was frantically searching. I picked it up and said "here it is." He nearly lost his mind that I was touching it. After throwing it at him and cussing him out a bit (lol) I stewed over it all day. That night while he was sleeping I got out his wallet, opened it up and laid each and everything out in a nice line across the table. I left him a note that said "I touched it ALL and I liked it!" He got over that little bit of stupid right about then. That first six months I also trained him to put the toilet seat down. It involved me dipping my ass in cold toilet water in the middle of the night, waking him up and threatening him with "if it every happens again I will wake you up again only it will be by pouring a bucket of what I just sat in over your head." Yeah, I'm that kind of a bitch. LOL
Lmao when I first read your thread i thought it said how do married couples share fiances and i was like that makes no spence and really they pein do split mortgage an all that fun stuff but its all really just a hassle and a pain in the ass so ya.
