Joint account

[Flopsy145]

My partner and I are looking at setting up a joint account (getting married next year and own a home and have a child, have been together 6 years so has been a long time coming!).

Currently the majority of bills come out of my account and he transfers me his share, but we want to instead open up a separate account for all our bills and food and any house stuff but to still get our pay check into our own account.

Can we set up a joint account with another bank or does it have to be with one of our current banks? (He's with Lloyds and I'm with NatWest).

You can set one up with whoever you want. However some of the online ones like Monzo insist on indvidual accounts being opened to open up a joint account. Not sure if high street banks are the same.

You can do it with anyone. We went for one of 'our' banks though as it was marginally more straightforward.

We use a joint account in exactly this way - I have a HSBC account which my wages go into and DH has an RBS personal account.

Then we have a joint Barclays account, all household bills come out of it and we both pay in the same amount each month to cover bills plus shopping etc.

Our joint account is with an entirely different bank (Santander) to either of our personal accounts

Ok thank you that's helpful! So as we wouldn't be switching over all our bills and completely moving current accounts so to speak would I have change all the direct debits individually to the new account?

That’s what I did, I know you can do a complete transfer if you’re moving entirely but like you it was joint household direct debits I wanted to move (we kept our own phones etc) I just did it manually.

It didn’t take that long to sort tbh.

There's around £200 bonus offers for opening new current accounts. Check if you are eligible for any of them.

One way of reducing the hassle would be for you to set up a new sole account, and then convert your existing one that the majority of the direct debits come out of into a joint account. Then you’d have to get your employer to pay into your new sole account, both of you set up standing orders into the now joint account, and then only DD’s which are currently coming out out of his account would have to be changed to the now joint account.

Oh - keep an eye out for any conditions on all of the accounts, e.g. that a minimum amount has to be deposited each month.

We have Monzo. Had to set up personal accounts that took 5 mins and we don't use but the joint account is brilliant