Need to regularly audit my DHs accounts but how?

[Alwaysforgiving]

My DH has an issue with being completely incompetent with money and not being able to stay in the black. His salary is being deposited to our joint account but it he's deep in his overdraft in two accounts. So I have some control, but I don't want to have a Hawkeye on every ALL the time.

Surely if his whole early is going in the joint some of it needs to come out to pay if the o/d ont eh other two.

What's he spending it on?

No way would my husband be 'auditing' my accounts, smacks of control.

I use YNAB (you need a budget) and we have linked all our accounts to it.

I changed all bills and incoming money to our joint account. We tsf an amount each into our personal accounts for ‘fun’ spending. As all our accounts are linked I can see what he spends money on and he can see what I spend mine on, but as long as we are within our money it’s not a problem.

In the first month we (I) saved him about £200 from cancelling direct debits I noticed coming out of his accounts that he had no idea of.

It’s been a revelation. He can spend what he wants and I do see it, but I just move it over to his spending amount we have budgeted for. Equally if he was interest he would be able to see mine (but he isn’t - he finds budgeting boring). It’s taken him a while to get used to but it’s made a HUGE difference to our finances.

Once we are a few months ahead in savings I’ll unlink our personal accounts so we can just spend our ‘fun’ money as we see fit.

I manage all our family finances including having access to all the accounts. I've tried loads of systems but the easiest way I've found to do this is via YNAB.

You can link the accounts to YNAB (I've been able to link all accounts (so transactions are downloading automatically) except 1 that I access manually) and I can therefore see what's in all of them.

You do have to pay for it but I tried loads of free ones before YNAB that it by far worked the best.

You can obviously also use it for budgeting and paying down debt which presumably you need too (and it's fantastic for!).

There are free ones like Money Dashboard that do similar things but as I say I didn't find the functionality worked as well. That was however a few years ago now so maybe check out the free ones first and see if they work well enough for you.

Although I manage everything my DH has access to our YNAB account do he can see at point what we have and what we are spending. And he is also involved in virtually all budgeting decisions. So there are no "control" issues. He sees everything I do and I see everything he does and we are both involved in the decision making. The only issue can come is at Christmas and birthdays etc as we can't really do surprises! But other than that it works really well.

The money as it is sits in a joint monzo account, he has access to that money at all times, but I do want him to have some sort of "freedom" and learn money management lessons.