I can’t understand the relationships where he pays half the mortgage, the cable, the car insurance, and his cell phone, and she pays half the mortgage, the electric and water bills, the groceries, and her cell phone bill, and they take turns paying when out to eat. It’s so bizarre, but so many couples do it! That’s trouble in my book.

We also discuss everything… so if something were to happen to me, she would know where everything is, how to invest, pay bills online, etc.

The other two accounts are joint only so that if something happens to one of us, the money is still under the control of the other person. However, those are only used individually. We each get $25 a week auto-moved from our main account into each of our “individual” accounts. This is our spending money, or allowance, and we’re not responsible to the other person for how we spend it, its our individual money. I happen to spend mine on going to the bar with my buddies, or buying comic books or games; she spends hers on movies and eating out with her friends, and sometimes buying stuff for her garden or clothes.

At the moment, I’ve got maybe $150 saved in my account, because I want to buy a nice new video card for my computer.

This works for us; we share all our finances, but we each get an allowance basically that is in its own account with its own debit card, that we can spend on whatever we want without needing to ask the other person, because that allowance for each of us is built into the budget and automatically transferred every Friday. The rest of our money is 100% each of ours, and we decide together what to do with it, how to budget it, when to spend it and what to spend it on, how to do savings, what to invest in, etc.

We’ve only been married a year (yesterday was our first anniversary actually), but we discussed how we were going to do things before we got married, and implemented all the changes to our finances within the first month of being married. Incidentally, my wife is a loan officer at a credit union, so she knows a lot about credit and loans and interest and making money, and she’s a real whiz at it, and I’m not, so I let her do most of the work because she enjoys it and looks at all of our accounts probably once a day on average, so I’m very blessed to be in that kind of situation.

Here’s something I learned from her last week that I had never heard before: your credit score drops if you have more than 50% of your available credit taken out. So, you have a card with a $10,000 available balance, and you’re carrying $4999 on it, your credit is fine. Charge a $2 coffee, and your credit score drops. This apparently happens on whatever day your credit card reports to the credit bureaus the owed/available ratio; since they don’t advertise that to people, apparently it’s best for your credit to keep your balance enough under 50% that you can still charge if you need to but not get hit with a credit drop.

However, I do like your other way of looking at it. By NOT having separate accounts, that could breed distrust.

You can look at it as 2 types of separate accounts then:
1) All money goes into a joint account and gets auto transfered in a specific amount to the individual accounts or
2) Each person’s paycheck (assuming they both work) gets direct deposited into their own accounts. It’s truly separated money.

I think #1 is ok, but you could do that budgeting for personal money in your head and on a spreadsheet. Having more accounts is just a pain to manage. #2 is where the problem lies. They each consider it “their money” and “their bills” and “their stuff”.

Once you’re married it’s “our stuff, money and bills” unless you don’t plan on sticking to the marriage very long and you’re already planning your escape.

I could just as easily say not trusting your wife to have her own account breeds distrust in your marriage. If you believed that, it would also be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Every one should do what works for them, and if it isn’t working they should try to change it without prejudice. There are probably as many ways of managing money in a relationship as there are relationships.