Recently an interesting thread popped up in the forums about joint and separate accounts. It seems that most people mentioned they had joint accounts. For Linda and I, we discovered that even though we had joint accounts, we still needed to have some amount of cash that was separate. We basically created a weekly “allowance” for each of us, that was our money to spend on ourselves for the week.
Since money issues are the number one reason for divorce in the U.S. I thought this would be a topic worth discussing and seeing how the readers handle it.
Feel free to respond to any of the questions below in the comments section…
- Do you and your spouse have joint accounts?
- Do you have any cash set aside for individual use?
- Have you learned any lessons the “hard way” with your finances in marriage?
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All of our accounts are joint (as are loans, etc.)
We’ve learned that everything that has to do with money should be out in the open. The fewer surprises the better.
Individual “free” spending is a good idea too.
That’s my take!
Every marriage needs a certain amount of space for breathing, this is particularly true when it comes to finances. You can’t have a spouse that questions every purchase you make and you doing the same to him or her. That is the recipe for marital disaster.
My husband and I have two checking accounts. Both are joint,on one he is the primary “owner” and on the other I am the primary. His paycheck is deposited to his account and he pays the bills from it. He transfers cash to my account every paycheck for me to use however I want. (I don’t work outside the home). We talk frequently about our finances. We’ve been using this system for years and find it really works for us.
We have joint accounts. We also get a certain amount of cash each payday that we call “Spending Money” that we can spend or save however we choose.
I do like Mary’s setup mentioned above, that would solve my DW’s complaint that she can’t buy me any gifts without me seeing where, when and how much she spent
This is funny, I actually started a series on my website about money & marriage. I figure February is a month we kinda associate with romance and love because of valentines day, so I thought I would incorporate money into the equation.
http://www.christianmoneymountain.com/2009/02/marriage-money.html
My wife and I have a joint account, but then we budget so much a month for personal spending. Its worked out well for us so far. I believe you can run into trouble when you have separate accounts.
My husband and I have one joint checking account. We use our credit card for most purchases (paid in full each month, of course!), and I pick cash up from the bank for him whenever he starts to run low.
The only problem we ever run into is when he wants to buy me something. He doesn’t want the hassle of a separate account, though, so I just keep extra cash in a safe spot at home and he uses that.
We have two separate checking accounts. She pays specific bills out of hers. I pay specific ones out of mine. We talk about upcoming expenses and try to work together on those. I do most of the planning and creating the budget.
My husband is in heaven now, but we used to have all joint accounts and gave ourselves a monthly allowance. It was built into our budget. I was primarily responsible to pay our bills, but we went over our budget together each month and made decisions together on any discretionary spending. I miss the accountability, but enjoy being a part of this group to help me in that area. I still give myself an allowance each payday.
This is so funny. My husband who manages our accounts agreed that we should have 1 joint and he gave me a personal checking acct for biweekly allowances for my personal use and won’t question my spending. This has worked out so well for us!
Since we both work and contribute our paychecks go into a joint acct for everything else and he gives me an allowance every other week when my paycheck comes in. The great part of this is, if we go under budget for the week he occasional extra allowances for my personal use that he transfers to my personal checking. This definitely worked for us and – feel is fair without breaking our budget.
What Bob’s not saying in this post is that he had to give me my own spending money because if it was all in one big pot I’d spend all of our money! LOL!
Linda that is my exact point! That is exactly why my husband did that. He’s so anal and meticulous when it comes to our finances. He has excel spreadsheets that he made for himself and he keeps into an account of every PENNY. So because I’m not like him, he did the separate personal account for that exact same reason! He was worried I’d spend our joint account away! Hahah.
well, in my case, it’s actually true! he he! : )
When we first got married, we were both working and established an agreement of ‘yours mine and ours’. We established a budget and then put equal amounts of our salary into the ‘ours’ account to meet our bugetary expenses – this served us well for a number of years.
Unfortunately, at some point in time, my wife decided this was no longer acceptable – and I became the only one putting funds into the joint account. This was followed by her buying groceries (for our neighbor) out of the joint account then getting paid cash by the neighbor (but never putting money back into the joint account). In the corporate world, this would be called embezzlement.
It came as a suprise to her when I closed the joint account. I figure if I’m going to be responsible for payng all of our bills (even though she is still working), I don’t need to keep up with two accounts. She now funds the groceries from her pay and I pay for everything else. And now that we have teenagers, she’s grousing about how much groceries are — but that is her problem — she chose to abuse the system, I won’t reward her for this abuse of my trust.