Spouse accounts

[Sébastien Monnet]

> Howdy!
>
> I am going to start tracking my wife's accounts with GnuCash. We
> maintain separate finances for ourselves with separate checking,
> savings and investment accounts. We then also have a third account to
> which we both contribute for shared expenses. Should I run all of
> these accounts in one set of GnuCash files, or should I keep them all
> separate and just indicate the transfers from one to the other
> (usually one of our checking accounts to the shared checking account)
> as an expense in the other account groups?
>
> Thanks
> Tad
>

Hi !

I use to have a common file for all the accounts (mines, my wifes,  
and common ones). Since 01/01/2007 I'm trying the over way: I've got  
one file for my personnal accounts and one for the common accounts  
(my wife manage her own accounts). My main expense for my personnal  
account is expense:family and I've got a mirror income account in the  
common file (income:Sebastien).

The main advantage: I can easily "hide" the presents (for my wife)  
prices... And we manage both the common one (regarding forward to  
have gnucash using a shared database as the main backend ;-)).
The main drawback is that you need to enter twice transactions that  
go from a personnal account to a shared one.

I prefer the "separated files" solution... I find it more "clean".

-seb