Best way to divide money when you’re married?

[Anonymous]

My wife and I have a joint checking and savings account, and we also have our own checking accounts. We give ourselves a certain amount of money each paycheck for personal spending and the rest is auto invested and goes to the joint checking/savings accounts. Joint accounts are used for household and couple expenses, personal accounts are used for hobbies, etc.

Is this a good way to do it? We are just starting out. I have a much higher income so it feels more fair to have joint accounts vs keeping everything separate.

[Anonymous]

All our accounts are joined. Keeps everything simple for us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My wife and I have a joint checking and savings account, and we also have our own checking accounts. We give ourselves a certain amount of money each paycheck for personal spending and the rest is auto invested and goes to the joint checking/savings accounts. Joint accounts are used for household and couple expenses, personal accounts are used for hobbies, etc.

Is this a good way to do it? We are just starting out. I have a much higher income so it feels more fair to have joint accounts vs keeping everything separate.

Yep! This is exactly what we do. Personal spending should be well defined though. Like if you both go to dinner does one pay from personal spending? We do. This makes it easier when you have kids too. Also, there are no questions when DH buys a new racing bike or I buy those expensive boots. If I have the money in my account, I get them. And the added bonus is that at Christmas you can truly surprise your spouse!

[Anonymous]

Joint everything. People divide in divorce not marriage.

[Anonymous]

Joint everything. We did this as soon as we got married 24 years ago.

[Anonymous]

You are a single economic unit. Act like one.

[Anonymous]

We do it the way you do it, OP, works for us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You are a single economic unit. Act like one.

Oh please. The way OP is doing it is fine. We've done something similar for almost 20 years and it's never been an issue.

[Anonymous]

Married over 30 years to the same person. All money is joint and all spending including hobbies comes from the joint accounts. I have an expensive hobby, spouse spends more on vehicles. Don’t know if it evens out because we don’t keep track.

We have a rule that we don’t borrow money except for mortgages and the occasional car payment and we won’t go into debt except for medical care (which only almost happened but we were able to avoid it by cutting costs to the bone and the luck of good jobs and health insurance).

Over the years, the higher wage earner varied. Some years me and some years not. All things are temporary. But our commitments were always the same.

We never fight over money, chores or responsibility for kids. Resources are all joint and we both contribute 100%.

[Anonymous]

We always just had joint accounts. We have very similar outlooks on our future, savings goals and we spend similarly.

I really don’t like separate accounts. I’m the higher female earner fwiw but I still spend more because I buy all household goods, gifts, kid clothes, vacations, on and on.

[Anonymous]

We are about to celebrate our 20th anniversary and have only had joint accounts. We have weathered surprise layoffs, unexpected huge bonuses, health issues that caused a long work pause, etc. Plus with kids I don’t know how we would have divided up our expenses. In the end while we’ve disagreed about individual purchases we’ve always agreed it’s all our money together.

[Anonymous]

We do joint everything

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We do it the way you do it, OP, works for us.

I want to add that there is no “best” way. So long as the spouses agree, you’re good.

[Anonymous]

All of our accounts are separate. I was in my 40s when I got married, there didn't seem to be any reason to open new accounts just to have both of us on them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We do it the way you do it, OP, works for us.

I want to add that there is no “best” way. So long as the spouses agree, you’re good.

+1. We opened a joint account when we got married but found it to be a massive PITA to link all existing accounts, autopays, direct deposits, and eventually abandoned it. So the way we do it is 100% of our funds are joint, but the money is not all in one account, and sometimes we zelle each other from the couch if a credit card bill is bigger than usual. Mint helps me track everything and I'm sad it's disappearing.

Our way sounds bizarre to most people and requires a lot of trust, but it's just a product of being kind of overwhelmed and lazy about doing anything different right after we got married.