re: Married couples and joint/separate bank accounts

Just dumb yellowfin

Wife and I have both. My paycheck goes to our joint account. We pay all our bills from our joint account. However, we still have our own accounts for little things here and there.

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Best solution I've ever heard and it works incredibly well for us... Have a single "house account" where both the husband and wife's paychecks go into. Each have their own personal allowance account. Every month, both the husband and wife get a spend allowance automatically transferred out of the house account into their spend account. This allowance account is for when I want to buy guns/fishing stuff and she wants to buy purses/clothes. Everything else gets paid out of the house account (bills, gas, groceries, entertainment that includes the both of us, vacations, dinners, etc).

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This is what we do as well.

From my anecdotal perspective, I find that married couples that have completely separate accounts don't manage money well.

I've seen instances where couples that have some sort of secondary income (overtime pay, side consulting project, etc.) will keep that out of the household account. Both spouses have access to these, though.

My wife buys her stuff with a Visa card online. I pay the bills with checks and make daily purchases with cash. Therefore our bank statement = my purchases for me and the home. Our Visa statement = her purchases for her stuff.

When her Visa bill goes over 1,000 I slap her around a bit. She calms down with compulsive buying for a few months. Then wash, rinse, repeat. But I have total control over all finances. That was the agreement before we got married. She admits that she is totally ignorant of money.