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We have one joint account for all bills, and secondary personal accounts that a specific $ amount is trasferred into every month. I would suggest that route for you two - that way you both have a set budget you can spend each month. Since he has a realllly expensive habit with smoking, that would cut more into his personal budget (and perhaps would be a wake-up call for him as to what it is doing to your finances).
I'm a firm believer in having a joint account when married, as I believe it is one factor that helps create one-ness. You should make decisions on how the money is spent together. Make a combined budget which allocates every cent that you two make and then stick to it... Have it include recreation, dates, splurges, bills, debt etc. Dave Ramsey talks about telling your money where to go.. every penny.. otherswise it just kinda "disappears" lol
As for the what money is spent on... I think that both husbands and wives should have allowances for spending on their own things.. or even decide those things together as well... & for the cigarettes.. you're marrying a smoker so either talk about it now or accept him and his needed budget.
Hope you two can get it all worked out well together =)
I would keep the same system you have now (two personal accounts and one joint account) I would just change the deposit system to also include enough money to cover bills (not just wedding stuff).
Or if you want to set up up in one account try something like what we did. My DH spends more money than I do on what I consider silly things (lotto tickets!). We each have an allowance every week that we each have in cash to buy whatever we want with. It gives us some freedom to buy thngs we want without breaking the bank.
When we get married we're planning on just having one joint bank account to combine all of our money. I think it will be simpler to just have one bank account and each just stick to a weekly or monthly budget for our personal spending havits. We just have to communicate any purchases we make which we already are doing anyway. I also really like the idea of us each taking money out for personal spending.
I agree with amnystik about having a joint account and having allowances. I understand that it's pretty much the same thing as having 2 separate accounts for spending money, but I would personally feel weird to have money that only I have access to and vice versa.
In my personal situation, FI and I don't live together and we have no joint finances. We don't even share a cell phone plan! Once we're married, we'll end up having 1 joint account.
You'll find a bunch of threads about this.
For us, after getting completely, totally screwed by my exhusband and us both being a little older, we do not have any combined finances. We split our bills up by our incomes and each pay a few of them without splitting any, if that makes sense.
Everyone is different :) Good luck!
We've been married for six months now and are just sitting down to solve this problem. Lol We each have separate accounts right now and I pay certain bills and my personal expenses and vice versa. But because he makes more money, I tend to run out of money first, which kind of sucks for me. So, we are going to open a joint checking account, keep his business account and have joint savings where money is automatically deposited each month.
We have one joint checking, one joint savings, and no personal accounts. I wouldn't have it any other way.
DH and I both view all of the money we make as "our" money, not "my" money and "his" money. We work together to pay for/buy what we want and need. That's part of what a marriage is, IMO.
Like PPs, we have one main account for bills which both our salaries are deposited into. We then get the same amount of personal spending money deposited into individual accounts on 'payday'. We also have a joint checking for household expenses like groceries, pets, eating out together, etc. so those expenses also have a budget. I'm a spender so my individual account usually has like $15 in it at the end of two weeks, but DH saves up and has a running balance of $1000 or so. We use these accounts for shopping, going out with friends (without the other), getting my hair done, etc. This has worked out great for us!
Bascially DH gets an allowance deposited into his own checking account, because he spends too much. All of the rest comes to our joint checking account that I control. I pay bills, get groceries, expenses for the house, and whatever we do together from dinners to vacations gets paid out of our joint account. All extra is then moved into our savings.
@JenniB: I think I like this idea. Having both paychecks desposited into one checking account on payday, but then having an automatic deposit go into "personal" checking account for limited personal spending. The joint account being used for bills, groceries, stuff we do together. And, then having an automatic withdraw of that account into a savings account, perhaps.
I'm not sure though, because my fiance likes to keep things simple. One credit card, one check card. I have 1 check card now, but also like 4 credit cards and multiple savings accounts. I think he might be confused if we had seperate cards.
For the bees who set an "allowance" but only one card, how do you manage it? Just keep checking the balances to see how much each other is spending?
@retroindigo: For allowances alot of times taking cash out if the best way.. especially if you both are new to budgetting together and tend to "over spend" or end up having to "move money around" to get everything taken care of. That way when your cash is gone it's gone.
Also, to add to my pp... I read an article that brought something to mind. What will be the plan when you two have children.. will you both still work or will you be home.
I the article the girl talked about having always had everthing combined with the "ours" attitude was really great b/c when she took time off to be home there weren't issues or strain/resentment about him now having to "share" as it had always been in one place for all or their combined needs/wants.
I had never thought about it that way.... but considering marriage = lifetime it's definitley worth thinking about now as opposed to later =_
@JenniB: This is what we do and what we'll continue to do when we're married. We've been together for over 5 years. We'll re-evaluate this when/if we have children. I would talk to your FI about options and what you're both comfortable with.
i'm with FutureKMM. We've been married for over a year and this set up/mind set has worked great for us.
@retroindigo: That method works out really well for us, but it can get a little bit complicated juggling four accounts. We sit down every 3-4 months to sort out if this account owes another account money and to reconcile. But all our accounts are through one bank, and its easy to set up auto-transfers and move money around if we need to. We took one day out of our honeymoon to hash it all out - what's household vs. personal, how do we pay for gas, all those random things. It was definitely worth it!
@JenniB: Have you tried Mint.com? So easy and it tracks everything for you.
We haven't changed it since getting married, but right now we have one joint checking account that we both deposit a small amount into, and individual savings and checking accounts. Its more that we haven't felt like doing all the work to move things around, which we figure we will do when we move to our next place.
Eventually, I'd like to have most of our money in one joint account (or, 1 checking, 1 savings), and individual accounts for personal expenses. For one, to me it doesn't feel like I'm buying him a present, or vice versa, if it is just coming out of OUR money, and there is no surprise in that, and two, I don't want to have to feel guilty about buying a new pair of shoes if we can afford it, nor do I want to resent how much he spends on golf. I think it's good for us to have that moeny to spend however we want.
But, at the end of the day, we do still feel like all money is our money.
We are married now and haven't actually done this yet but we plan to get a joint account soon but still keep our personal accounts. We're going to set it up with our paychecks so a certain amount goes into the joint account to cover bills and the remainder will go into our personal accounts.
We will have several accounts:
DH and I sat down one night and wrote down all our fixed bills. Then we looked at the variable bills like food and gas to estimate our variable bills. That gave us what was left over. We want to save X amount by X date so that told us what was left for spending money and gave us our allowance.
It seemed complicated but once you setup all these autowithdrawals and whatnot it's pretty easy.
When we first got engaged and moved in together we had separate checking accounts. We figured out who would pay what bills (I'd pay the mortgage and he'd pay the HOA dues, and cable/electric/gas etc) and then traded off paying for shared expenses like dinners out, groceries, etc. It ended up being a less than ideal situation because FI makes less than half what I do and he's in a service business so he has variable income based on billable hours. So there were months when he couldn't meet all of his obligations and then I had to pay them and he felt bad about it. We've had a joint checking account for about six months and it has been so much better. As for savings, we've kept the savings we came into the relationship in separate accounts. It's not romantic but if we were to divorce it will make spliting our assets much easier since property owned before the marriage is kept separate (at least in California, not sure about other states).
My husband and I have joint everything. We basically have an allowable amount that we can spend on stuff each month and we just have to work with that and talk to eachother about larger purchases.
We are not yet married, and have all bank accounts joint. Both paychecks go into a single account and we pay everything from that account. We discuss bills, payments, credit cards and savings once every couple of weeks (or when big bills come in)
Since we have fairly similar spending/saving styles this works pretty well, and keeps both people informed so we wont have the "My husband/wife ran up bills of $30,000 and I had no idea until they came to take our stuff" situations.
However, there are many different ways to handle it, and the key is to find something that works for you. In our case, we are still getting used to the feeling of being under a microscope for each purchase, even though neither of us complains or makes the other feel bad about spending money here and there.
-- Nick
Right now FI and I have seperate checking accounts, even though we live together. he just gives me his money and i put it into my account and pay the bills. he keeps some each check for himself to spend how he wants. Not the most ideal situation right now, but once we get married, we're going to get a joint account together.
The confusion for us lies in that my kids get SSI from when my first husband passed away, and that pays all our monthly bills. So I'll have to transfer that over when we get married, but we do plan to have a joint account. I do however have credit cards in my name only, and my car/house is only in my name.
I've written about this before:
After we got married we combined finances but do not have 'individual free spending money allowances'. We think that if our finances are combined why bother to have free secret money that you don't tell the other about. What's his is mine - he gets to know about every Target run and whatnot that I buy. There is no reason for us to hide that. Also we don't have to ask permission to do those things - we are responsible adults who can make decisions. We both know what we can and can't afford.
The thing that I personally don't know (or understand) about these individualistic accounts is - example - what if you both go out and get coffee or see a movie. Who pays? Is that your treat for him or vise vs. Or is that a joint bill? What if you need to buy shampoo or pitch in for a gift for a colleage - is that a personal bill or a necessity thus joint? Who makes these decisions? Do you ever 'pay him back' for things he bought with his allowance but want to pay with your allowance? That to me just calls for trouble and a logistic nightmare. I don't want to ever owe money to my spouce! Plus what if after a year he's saved his money and you've spend all yours. Where does that leave you? Would he put all his money back into your savings or keep it? That seems unfair. What if he invested his $ towards retirement and you didn't? You can't live separate lifestyles when you retire at 65. Plus you've got to think about how long this arrangement is for - 1 year, until you have kids, forever? Basically, to me we save and spend together. We live our lives together and we'll get anywhere or nowhere together.
For us it will be joint account/savings. Individual checking/savings (which isn't a secret).
Auto deposit our checks for example 75% to our joint, and diffeerance allocated to our personal accounts.
Obviously joint bills (household expenses, groceries), go out to eat, vacation etc, clearly that comes out of our joint accounts (which we each have...hold your breath..individual ATM cards for said joint accounts. So it doesn't matter who pays.
So there is no paying back or owing the other for anything. At least in our household. Personal bills paid from our personal accounts. Its not that complicated as some would like you to believe.
We have a joint checking account and a joint savings account, much easier that way!
This is something we've been discussing a lot. We both have a lot of debt (school loans and so forth) so we're not sure how to combine. Does anyone else have suggestions? Sorry to threadjack!
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Hey bees, so I'm hoping for some advice on this one. We got engaged on Christmas and about a week after we set up a joint checking account that was hooked to our personal checking accounts. We've been depositing the same amount of money every pay check to put toward wedding costs. So far its working well, but we still manage our regular finances (bills, rent, etc) by splittting or taking turns. And it can be kind of a pain sometimes. So, when we are officially married I would like to combine our finances and just write one check for the bills from one account that both our money is. What's the best way to do this? My guy likes to spend a lot more on other stuff (cds, books, beer , etc) than I do. I was raised with a very frugal mindset. SO, I'm not sure if we should just do one joint checking account and then savings, or if we should keep our own checking accounts but then just put the bulk of our paychecks into the shared one, that way we still have our "own" money for spending on other stuff. (Plus, he is a smoker and I HATE how much he spends on cigarettes.) What did you do?