Shared finances vs separate accounts

[highlandmum]

We have both a joint chequing account, and savings account, as well as personal chequing, savings, and TSFA accounts. Our joint bills - property tax, hydro, gas, groceries all come out of the joint chequing as well as small personal purchases, joint savings is for home repairs, furniture and larger unexpected items. Our personal chequing account is our fun money, so when I go to get my hair done this weekend it come out of their, the rims he purchased for his car came out of his. Then the savings account is for personal large purchases for ourselves (I just bought a car with mine), TSFA is a secondary retirement account or in the worst case for extreme emergencies. All our accounts have the other as the beneficiary as WellPreserved has said.

We have no say in what the other purchases with their personal accounts but the rule is if you burn through that money do not touch the joint, and do not ask the other for anything.

[SisterSomeone]

For one thing, I personally could never share because I simply do not trust anyone on this green earth enough to let them have free and unfettered access to my money. Whatever part of the brain allows people to trust someone that much, I'm missing it. If I knew that someone has the power to clean me out completely, I would never sleep again.

For another thing, to be completely honest, the question of sharing never even came up for us. My husband and I didn't get married young and broke and with nothing to lose. We both came in with personal properties, investment portfolios and savings and it was a foregone conclusion that combining assets is off the table with prejudice.

The way we initially did things was split household expenses loosely down the middle and trust that we break even in the end. After a few years this got F***ing annoying to keep track of and we set up a joint checking account specifically for home expenses and only for home expenses. We both transfer a percentage of our income into it each month and then bills, mortgage, maintenance, grocery shopping, etc. are paid out of it. We're currently debating whether it would be worthwhile to add a joint savings account for vacations, holidays, family activities, etc. Other than this, we keep our assets fully separate and quite frankly we don't get into each other's business much.

One thing I'll say about this is it 100% works for us. In nearly 11 years of marriage we haven't had a single fight about money because there's is nothing to argue about. The lines are clear and logical. I genuinely don't even understand how we would possibly get into an argument about money.