Joint Banking Account and Budgeting

 

Happy Friday everyone! Do you ever have those weeks where you feel energized and enthusiastic? No? Is that just me? Some weeks, I feel like crud and all I do is just go through the motions of day-to-day to get through the week. Then other weeks, I am full of pep and feel as though I can accomplish anything. This is one of those weeks. I wish Ryan felt the same. Someone is tired and needing a weekend break! I’m so use to this crazy time of year. It’s something that I’ve grown accustomed to. But, I’ve had 25 years of practice.

As you are aware, Ryan and I have now been married for 1 year! A lot has happened in the last year and we have really grown as a couple. One of the things that we discussed before getting married was money. Never an easy topic to talk about. We decided before we got married that at least for the first year we would keep our separate bank accounts.

For the last year, it has worked out. We kind of threw caution to the wind and for the most part (on everything except groceries) we didn’t really budget our money. With the big pool renovation happening and a future wedding down South, we sat down and started figuring out our budget as a married couple.

This spread sheet really helped!

Sitting down and figuring out expenses and savings as married couple was different but not overly difficult. What was difficult came later when we started enforcing the budget.

The issue with being married and having a budget is that it is very difficult to figure out your spending when the other person has a separate account! I would have to constantly go back and forth between both of our accounts to figure out where our money was going.

Not to mention it was very difficult to make things fair. Because I looked after most of the financials (aka paying bills, balancing cheque boots, etc.), most of the costs would come out of my account leaving me with little spending money and Ryan thinking he had lots! The balance just wasn’t there.

Finally, shortly after we celebrated 1 year of marriage we were also at the bank signing up for a joint account.

There was always something very “unromantic” to me about a joint account. The thought of seeing ALL of the spending between one another would make holiday time not as much fun. That is why we opted to keep our separate savings account and have a joint chequings account.

Now that is has been over a month with our new system and things couldn’t be better for me as “the family banker”. Keeping track of spending is so much easier! Not to mention we both seem much more cautious with our spending because now it is “our money.”

I feel kind of more “grown up” now that we have a joint banking account. It seems silly to say but it feels far more responsible then what we were doing before. I wasn’t sure if we would ever have a joint banking account. Like I said before, something about it seemed so unromantic. However, we bit the bullet and now we can officially say that things are “ours".

Have a great weekend!

xo