We have a joint checking account and separate credit cards (to maintain our own credit ratings. We pay them off each month). Each of our paychecks go into our joint checking account and we use our credit cards for almost every purchase. We have a budget setup which includes everything: expenses, savings, giving, and our “fun money” that each of us can use for whatever we want.

We use mint.com to maintain our budget. We track all of our purchases/transactions from all of our savings, checking and credit accounts. We assign each transaction to the different categories in our budget to make sure we are staying on track.

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.