Allowances
Much like the people over at Marriage and Money, Seppo and I have individual monthly allowances. It works so well for us that I am rather weirded out when someone says that it’s controlling/harsh, as the linked post illustrates.
All necessities, household purchases, and bills are paid out from the joint checking account. All paychecks and random cash goes into the joint checking account. We have a joint savings account which holds a relative small reserve of money for emergencies and is directly linked with the checking account for easy access. We have a high-interest savings account that holds most of our money.
In addition, we have separate personal checking accounts, personal credit cards (with various reward structures), and a joint credit card. We put everything on credit cards, so that we can track out spending automatically, then pay them off right away — no need to wait for the bill to arrive in the mail, since I’m always looking at the balances every couple of days.
We spend our moderate allowances however we choose, whether it’s splurging for dinner with a friend (when spouse is not there), clothes, gifts, entertainment, whatever. It’s really nice. Since neither of us spends like a psycho in general, there is no resentment over individual indulgences, and neither of us has to justify anything to each other. And presents feel great when you can buy them with your own personal stash, so you can go nuts if you want.
Since most of our other expenses are fixed, we generally have a consistent amount of money left over every month which gets saved. We’d be throwing it into the highest interest loan (currently, the HELOC for the Georgia house), but since we are saving up for renovating the upstairs, this is all going into our savings account.
Anyway, how do you couples/families do your finances? Do you care to share? Are you happy with how it works? I firmly believe that different people need different solutions, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend our method across the board, but if you think you share a similar outlook on spending & saving as we do, I’d highly recommend that you give it a try.
I don’t have this problem, and will continue to bitch and moan about it at every possible chance.
Screw you guys. I’m going home. /Cartman.
We have a similar setup to Chad’s – we each have our own checking, but all bills are paid from a joint checking account (except for personal stuff like insurance, credit cards, etc). We make monthly deposits into the joint account and if there’s anything left over, we just use that to treat ourselves to dinner and whatnot.
As for savings, we both have our own CDs – no joint savings.
1 checking, 1 savings, 1 credit card – all shared. We direct deposit into the checking and transfer to the savings when it gets high (which is not often enough :^)
M and I are still in transition, having only been engaged for 4 months. We haven’t set up any joint accounts yet, but mean to. We’re pretty casual about it all so far, writing each other checks or giving each other cash depending on the needs of the moment.
It’s great to hear what others are doing, so I have ideas for when M and I take the next steps.
One thing I forgot to add: I always thought that what I’d want was a highly structured system where my partner and I paid for shared expenses equally and I got to keep all of my extra income to do with as I pleased. That’s not how it’s working with M at all. Not even close. We very naturally just consider all of our assets to be “ours,” no matter who’s account the money happens to be in at the moment. It’s kinda nice.
Yeah, I really like everything being completely equal: everything in the shared accounts is ours jointly, and if we agree together to buy some big ticket item, it doesn’t matter who brought it up because it was together, plus having equal amounts of spending money per month, regardless of where the money comes from.
The way I see it – the joint account is simply for convenience of paying bills. We just dump an equal amount of money in there, and there’s never any haggling over who pays what, etc.
But, that doesn’t mean our personal accounts are only for ourselves. The other night, we took her family out to an expensive dinner. If we had paid out of the joint account, it would have put a serious drain on the amount of money in there, so I just paid it myself. We just figure that we both take turns paying for stuff, so it all evens out at some point.
I don’t have that problem right now. My Big and his wife have joint everything, while my Little and his wife have seperate everything. The Little and her husband have joint and seperate. When the Big and I were discussing the differing situation, he was shocked at the Little/Wife’s situation, saying it’s all for a common goal, what if the other wasn’t saving enough for retirement, big purchases, etc. Apparently the Little/Wife pay for joint expenses based on income, the with larger pays a larger %. Sure if it were all joint it would work out that way, but it still seems like an odd system to me. The closest I ever got was a joint savings that we both contributed to in equal amounts (she kept the account when we split, along with the rest of the money I leant her). I am, understandably a bit wary of joint accounts. I’ve worked f’in’ hard for what I’ve got and am willing to share it, but think that both parties need to do their part. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be comfortable with joint accounts, but really think they are the way to go. My $0.02.
Oddly we have never had an issue with money. It was easy, Charles’s money was alway my money… even when we were dating. 🙂 TUPBC
With exception to car insurance and some other smaller stuff, all bills are paid from a joint checking account which is fed by direct deposit, while the remainder is sent to our personal checking accounts. We used to have a joint savings account, but now we just split it up between our ING accounts.