Money question for married OOT'ers

[trapsetter]

For those of you who are married, I am curious: do you and your spouse have separate bank accounts, or do you have all your cash in joint accounts?

My wife and I have always had separate accounts, not because we have some privacy issue but simply because we never bothered to merge them when we got married, and we also like to be able to more easily track our own monthly spending. Lately we have been talking about merging them into a joint account, just to make everything more convenient, and I am curious what people's thoughts and experiences are on this subject.

We have a happy marriage and nothing to hide from each other (we both look at each other's statements at the end of the month anyway), and we share similar views on spending and what is appropriate.

[econophile]

i'm not married, but why not have a joint account and separate accounts?

[CheckCheckFold]

trapsetter,

How do you currently take care of monthly finances such as rent , groceries, bills, and waht not? Do you write separate checks to cover them?

[KidLifeCrisis]

Wasn't this just asked like 2-3 weeks ago?

[odellthurman]

We have two joint accounts, but one account is almost completely controlled by me and the other by her. We budget what income/bills pass through each account.

[4_2_it]

Married 15 years and have a joint checking account. Makes life a lot easier having it all in one place.

I do have a separate account for poker because she has no desire to see how much money I'm making (or in her words 'losing') [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[Yo Adrians!]

We have one checking and one savings. I take care of all the monthly bills, she takes care of the groceries, household needs, our son's needs, etc. We have a budget and, for the most part, we stick to it.

The only problem we had with one account was early in our marriage when we both had a check card ... and she was a little late reporting some of her purchases, causing us to be overdrawn a time or two. But that was six years ago and we have a good system today.

[By-Tor]

we put all our money in our matress, but right in the middle

[img]/images/graemlins/shocked.gif[/img]

[jzpiano]

Getting married in Oct. and we already figure out that we will have a main joint/savings for everything. But we will also each have a separate checking account that a monthly "allowance" will be transfered to. That account will be individually ours and $ can be spent anyway we want (me poker, golf, her shoes, clothes)

[poorolrich]

There you go. We have both. We each put ex amount into the joint and the savings account each month. Whats left is used for our individual expenses.