I am a personal finance fanatic. I grew up poor, and while for the most part my basic needs were met, I look back and never want to live the way we did. Nor do I want my children to live that way. What has that done to me? I have become passionate about personal finance, and how to be careful over what I spend my money on, how I save, and how I think about my future.
Which is what leads me to my blog title. There are a few subjects I think are taboo in our society. We rarely talk about our sex lives, and we rarely talk about money. Yes, we talk in surface ways about money, but never about how much we make, how much we save, and how much we feel most comfortable about having in our savings account. Why is that? I often wonder why it is such a taboo subject. Is it because comparisons make us feel like we are lesser than, or better than others? Possibly. What is funny, is you could live next to a run down home, that gives the facade that someone does not have the finances to keep it up, and maybe they do. Maybe it is just a choice that they live that way.
So, about checking accounts. Do you and your spouse or significant other have joint or separate checking accounts? I know that I will probably piss someone off today, as I am from the joint checking account camp. When Chris and I got married we decided to pool our finances, or rather I should say to be politically correct, we decided to pool our debt. We did not have much cash when we got married, we just had debt. Credit cards, school loans, you know normal twenty-something-year-old debt. Not too crazy, but still money we owed. So maybe it was easier for us to pool our finances, and make financial choices together. Would we have thought differently if we had plenty of cash in the bank? I hope not. Why? It works for us. We talk about everything, we discuss our purchases, and it all makes sense to us.
Yet, I know that a lot of couples fight about money. They fight about debt. Having separate checking accounts work for them, and I want to know why.
#pleaseshareyourexperience!
random olio 
#JointChecking #JointDebt #JointDecisions 🙂
We like to keep this topic pretty transparent between us. I do the finances (banking, bills, etc), but WE do the budget. We determine what we’re going to spend on, invest in, etc, and how we’re going to save. We each get a monthly “spending money” amount that the other person doesn’t have a say in. It also rolls over so if at the end of a year we haven’t spent anything out of it, we’ll have 12months worth of spending money that the other doesn’t have any say in. For other items, we check in with each other to see if the purchase is something we agree on. It’s worked well for us.
Thanks for posting!
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OOOOoo…I like that idea of the monthly spending money, and that it rolls over at the end of the year! Love it. Thank you for sharing!
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