Money problems are one of the oldest and most difficult problems that confront married couples whether they have been married for five days, five months or five years. So deciding how money is going to be handled is among the most difficult decisions and one where all the guidance in the world does not provide a sure-fire formula for what will work. There is a great book on the subject called Financial Planning for Couples by Adriane G. Berg.
Berg makes the observation that a couple will know what feels fair. If it feels fair – then it’s right.
Joint or Separate Checking Accounts?
So what’s the best advice for couples when it comes to deciding on pooling their resources into a joint checking account or maintaining the separate accounts they had before they were married? Let me tell you a little about my own experiences in this department. Both my husband and I were relatively successful in our chosen careers when we got married.
We decided to go ahead and maintain our separate checking accounts because there were many direct deposits from paychecks and other direct withdrawals already associated with those accounts. We opened a joint checking to which we deposited portions of our paychecks twice a month to cover all joint household expenses.
This lasted for about a year when we decided to close down the separate checking and consolidated everything to the joint account. There’d been too many clerical issues and mistakes made that were causing friction. By pooling everything, we were able to make a consolidated decision. Still – it fell to one or the other of us to handle managing the money because we both have very different styles of book keeping.
Autonomy
The biggest challenge we faced was maintaining our autonomy. Neither of us cared for asking the other for tacit permission to spend money – it was also frustrating to not understand clearly where everything was going or why money we felt like should be there wasn’t. If you are picturing some arguments boiling over in this situation – you are not wrong.
So clearly, we’d started out with separate accounts and a shared joint and moved to a shared joint following friction and money issues with the individual accounts – what were we to do? The system we ended up developing occurred more by trial and error – it didn’t surprise me to find this is actually a recommended way of handling money for newlyweds – though I could wish someone had given us this advice a lot earlier before we stumbled onto it ourselves.
Clearly Defined Goals
The purpose of the checking account was to act as a repository that we could draw funds from in order to pay our bills. It was also a place where we deposited all of our paychecks. One of us needed to act as the bookkeeper and since my husband is much better with fine-tuning numbers – the two of us voted him into the job.
The second goal was that we both needed to feel some autonomy. I needed to be able to feel like I wasn’t saying ‘mother may I’ in order to use money from the account and he didn’t want to be the jerk saying no all the time. As a compromise – we sat down and made a list of the must be paid bills every month – specifically those that didn’t fluctuate – from there, we established exactly how much we needed to have in the account at any given time.
Then we gave ourselves an allowance. The allowance was – for example – a hundred free dollars that we could take out every paycheck either each or to be split between us. That money was our petty cash. We could use it on whatever we wanted. It was never to be used on necessities such as bills, groceries or other household shared expenses. It was our fun money.
Balancing the Books
Some months, our free money was less than others and some months it was higher. Some months we hardly touched our petty cash and it would grow and we could even save it up if there was some big splurge we wanted to do including going out to a favorite restaurant or getting a new game system. The point was – it worked pretty well for us up until our daughter was born.
We had to reassess then because I left my job to be a full time mother. Our allowances didn’t go away, we just minimized them – of course – during the first year after our daughter was born it seemed like a huge splurge to just get a meal that could be eaten without the baby needing something in the middle of it.
Ultimately, you have to make the decisions that seem fair to both of you and that you both have a comfort level with. You also need to accept that how you handle it will adjust accordingly over time to changing needs, circumstances, income and even where you happen to be living at the time. But as long as you both keep a firm grasp on how you are going to handle your money issues – then you can hopefully avoid having your money issues handle you or shift the balance of power between you as a couple.
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