joint or shared checking accounts

[Adam Monsen]

On Sat, 01 Jan 2005 01:13:23 -0600, Matthew Vanecek <mevanecek at yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
> If this is a marital (or life-partner) situation, the joint account
> represents a single entity (the couple) that incurs expenses.  Benjamin
> explained this pretty well, so I'll try to just touch on my previous
> experiences.  When my wife and I had separate accounts, and she gave me
> money, I would use "Wife's income" as the balancing account, and when I
> gave her money, I would use 'Wife's Expenses" as the balancing account.
> It was a real pain, but we were too lazy to change for a while.
> However, as we expect out commitment to be a lifelong commitment, we've
> consolidated into a single set of joint accounts, and I manage the books
> as if we were a single entity (with disparate sources of income, of
> course).  If I need to denote who incurred an expense, I use the Notes
> field.  We expect this to really give a humongous boost in managing our
> finances (and it has, not to mention the required increase in
> communication!).  There are many good books on handling finances within
> a relationship--Dave Ramsey or Larry Burkett are my favorite authors on
> the subject.  Definitely worth investing in.
[...]

This will be a marriage, and your comments here were very useful!

Thank you to all others who replied as well.

-- 
Adam Monsen <adamm at wazamatta.com>
http://adammonsen.com/