To ask about sharing bank accounts…

[stripeysquirrel]

Married last year and have our first baby on the way

I pay the utility bills and DH pays the rent, that’s how it’s always been. We are buying our first house and so will likely have the mortgage come out of our joint account instead.

Just wondering how others do it normally. Do you pay all your wages into the same bank account and just spend from that, or keep it separate?

We both earn similar amounts but obviously I’ll earn a bit less on maternity leave. Is it easier just to pool all money together or in doing so do you lose all your financial independence?

We each have our own accounts and put the same amounts into a joint account each month to cover all the bills. The rest we can each spend how we please, though to be fair, a lot has gone on the DCs recently. It's worked well for us over the past 22 years.

That indeed is a proper marriage/ relationship

For some maybe but certainly not for me. In fact it would be a deal breaker if my partner insisted on one joint account

Fair enough having a joint account for bills, that makes sense rather than you pay for this and they pay for that. But my income goes into my account and would never have it any other way

Worked in finance for far too long and been to so many educational talks about financial security and the impact of the lack of education, sadly more with women, about financial matters when a partner leaves or dies.

Before we were married / pregnant / mat leave etc we had one joint account, but were paid wages into separate account. We put in enough to cover all expenses proportionally to our income.

Now we have baby on the way everything goes into one account. We each get paid an equal amount of fun money into our personal accounts for whatever we want so we can each have discretionary spending for whatever we want.

Yes that’s a fair point, i do think there’s a difference between asking permission and chatting through something though - like recently buying a car I chatted to my husband about it lots because I value his opinion - also chatted to my dad about it loads and he had no financial involvement obviously! And I imagine you need to have similar financial outlooks/perspectives for it to work well - if you have very different spending habits prob best to keep some separation!

I'm definitely more of a spender than DH so it works for us.

Calculated total of household bills including groceries and petrol (petrol only once we'd had a baby as we tended to use his car more as it was bigger). Included £100 a month for joint savings to cover unexpected bills.
Total split as a proportion of total income and recalculated each year ie my income went down post baby.
Each set up standing order to joint account based on that split.
All household expenditure paid from joint account.
All personal expenditure paid from own accounts.

Worked for the 22 years we were together.

With ex we had our wages paid into our own account then transferred over enough into shared account to cover bills. Worked well.

We have a joint account. He puts a bit away into PayPal and I put a bit into savings so we have money for surprises etc.

Everything goes in and out of one account. We don’t ask permission to buy things. Expensive things involving a discussion would be things like a car or holiday which presumably most people would talk about before hand, however their bank accounts work. And if I buy new clothes or whatever my husband would end up seeing it anyway so I wouldn’t care if he saw I’d spent money on it. As long as no one is gambling their money away or something (which would be much easier to hide if they had their own account) there shouldn’t be an issue.

Surely whatever you do, you have to end up with the same amount of personal spending. Or do some of you think that the person who earns the most should have the most disposable income. I earn more than DH but the job he does is way more useful than mine. I'm buggered if he's going to end up with less money than me because of it.

All our money goes into 1 account, bills is immediately transferred to another then what's left is spends

Everything goes into and out of one joint bank account.

We both spend what we want, but would mention big expenses (eg if DW car needs 4 new tires and a fan belt she would let me know so that I don’t also buy a new dishwasher or something at the same time).

We buck the MN trend by having zero joint accounts.

Been married for 25 years, share expenses obviously. Our financial dealings are too complicated as we invest separately. We know who has what invested where and also the returns. We also know exactly how much money we spend overall and have projections which takes inflation in to account and interest rates.

We do not end up with the exact personal spends however the amount we have left over is I would imagine above average.

All salary money into joint current account.

Standing order to bill payment account that pays for direct debits/standing orders, annually paid bills such as car insurance, MOT etc plus a bit more to cover things like general car/house maintenance type stuff.

Standing order to easy access savings account. How much varies if we are saving for something specific.

What is left in joint account is for day to day purchase’s throughout the month. Anything left at end of month goes to savings. If savings build up they get moved to a high interest account.

We are financially similar in spending so no issues. If anyone wants to buy something bigger we just check with the other in case we would go over drawn, or need to pull money back in from savings.

We have similar salaries, we get our salaries to separate account and pay the same over the joint account and for savings. We do what we want with our ‘own’ money. We pay for our individual things from our accounts. We both pay separate phone bills as husband wanted a fancier phone so his bill is higher, as we each pay our own phone bills I don’t care.

We shared our accounts when we got married. It makes sense, especially when you have kids and one parent will likely have a much lower income for a while. The way I see it is if we got divorced it would all be split anyway!

Re. Your question about birthdays, the money just comes out of the same pot. We don't really hide what we spent, although don't go actively checking the bank account to find out either!

Exactly this :)

I'm actually really surprised at the number of people with joint accounts. I was brought up to have my own wages paid into my own account. All our money is pooled and the spreadsheet has us paying whatever needs paying. What's left is divided by 2 and that's our own money.

Snap - we have a joint current account and credit card and individual ones. It helps that we are both quite tight and take ages to decide on a major purchase so neither of us blows loads of money.

If you're married then all money and bills are joint money. So ...

A joint account that wages are paid into. Then money for bills transferred to bills account, savings to savings account (again joint).

Spending comes out of the first account.

All wages to one account. Standing order pays a set amount into a second joint account every month that overs all the bills. Second standing order into a joint savings account. We have a credit card each that we spend on, then pay both off in full every month.

Ours all go in and out of the same account, but presents on credit card and repay out of bank account immediately.

We have a joint account and an account each. We pay into the joint account and use that for all "common" spending. Our own accounts are ours alone and the other one doesn't have any access to or information about them. It's worked for us for nearly 40 years!

Joint and separate, both pay proportion of wages into joint and join savings- then have x remaining to spend on ourselves plus our own savings. Dh dad screwed his mum over by clearing all their joint money on the night he left leaving her with nothing so he won't let either of us get in that situation

Have a think about what would suit you best, because there's no set way.

Ex-H and I never had any form of joint account, but we both had similar views on how to fairly split expenses, and both would give the other money if needed.

Generally we split bills proportionately, but we also recognised that this would leave the lower earner (which varied over the years) with less 'spends' so the higher earner also did more 'treating'. Little of this was discussed in its entirety, we just fell into it gradually as we moved in together and as changes happened. Neither of us were ever very keen on combining finances though.

I do think a discussion with your husband on how this would best work for you would be helpful in seeing how you both view money.