Good relationships

There are varying approaches to sharing bills and setting up your accounts to make it easy to track where you are. One way is to open a joint account which pays bills, with each of you contributing to the joint account. The amount you put in a joint account could be equal or prorated to your respective salaries. Another way of organizing your finances is to open a joint account and have all earnings go into the joint account. If all salaries flow into a joint account, we highly recommend that you each retain a personal account which will hold money that is your personal money to spend in any way you choose. The joint account would transfer a certain amount monthly that becomes your personal discretionary money. A third possibility is that you each retain your personal accounts and just allocate who will pay which bills, doing a reconciliation of the budget by the end of each month.

Read more about the approaches to sharing expenses and creating a household budget in our book Financial Essentials for couples available on Amazon. The link and a description can be found on our website at https://parentsfin.wixsite.com/website/books

These books highlight important topics like those below:

·Different budgeting methods

·Creating joint goals · Savings for major expenses

·Improving your credit scores

·How couples with different money views can reconcile their differences