Separate and Joint Bank Accounts - How Do You Make it Work?

You've been married for a few years and have begun thinking about having separate accounts and sharing a joint account for "house" expenses. How do you make it all work? Maybe early on there was little money but now you both have full time jobs and would like to have some "guilt free" money to spend on yourselves. How do some of the bills, like student loans and credit cards, get divided? And what do you do with your direct deposit? Should you have them deposited into the "joint" account and then divide out evenly to the separate accounts, or do you have each individual direct deposit put into your own accounts and transfer what is needed to the "joint" account?

In my opinion there are several approaches to this situation:

You could easily share an account and consider ALL of your bills joint - mortgage, utilities, student loans, credit cards, cars, everything that is a fixed or household expense (including eating out together and entertainment) should come out of our joint account. Then you can determine how much shared money you each have available as your "fun money" to use on whatever you'd like individually. You can save up for something, blow it all on CDs or books, get a pedicure, etc. You don't have to base it on a certain % of your income just allocate money to bills and savings first and then decided how much of what was left would be appropriate for the two of you to split.

You can also have a joint account for your "shared" bills - mortgage, utilities, groceries, etc. and individual accounts for your personal bills - cars loans, credit cards, eating expenses for the week, and "fun" money. You can have your pay direct deposited into your individual accounts, you just have to make sure that you transfer whatever amount is needed to your joint account for the bills the two of you share. This is a great idea when it comes to buying gifts for each other. That way the other doesn't know where it came from, or how much it cost. This system works fine as long as your trust each others spending habits, and you know without a shadow of a doubt that your bills are going to be paid!

A less practical approach is to have two individual accounts and designate bills - you pay this bill, I'll pay that bill. This method may lead to hard feelings from one or the other of you who feels like the are contributing more towards bills while the other is mindlessly spending. Or, if one of you has more debt than the other - credit cards, school loans, etc. there can be an unfairness about it. If the two of you are reasonable about your "fun" spending and are aware of your individual expenses then as long as your bills are paid, and on time, this works just as well as any other method.

All in all the choice is yours, so sit down with your partner and figure out what is going to work best for the two of you.