When To Get A Joint Checking Account

It took Paul and I an abnormally long time to finally get a joint bank account. Maybe this is one downside to the whole living together before marriage thing – I wouldn’t recommend combining your finances before having a formal (erm, legal) commitment. So when it came time to get married, we were already settled into a routine of paying rent and bills. Making the change to one bank account seemed like a pretty good idea, but we just never got around to it until six months ago.

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When we finally got to the bank and combined our assets, debt, and made one central home for our paychecks, the change didn’t seem so big. But finances have always been a weaker area for us. We’re not irresponsible or anything, but we hadn’t really sat down to talk about how our money is being spent and where we could save and do a better job preparing for our future.

So we finally made time for that as well. We took an afternoon to go through our bank statements from the previous few months and talk about our individual spending habits.

A few things popped out immediately:

• Paul spends a lot of money on video games.
• I spend a lot of money on clothes.
• We both spend a lot of money on entertainment and eating at restaurants.
• We are not putting enough away each month to achieve our goal of buying a home in the next four years.
• Our debt is manageable but not really being effectively paid down.

It was at this point that I felt a little bit of regret that we hadn’t done this before. I mean, all of these indicators seemed so obvious and were probably in both our minds – but we never talked about it.

We have had a joint checking account now for just over six months. We still go out every once in a while, I am wearing a new shirt and Paul is playing one of those shooting video games that I don’t recall the name of. But these are now occasional indulgences. We help keep each other accountable – not by policing one another, but by supporting what we each love and being more aware of the overal mutual wants and needs. We now have a quarter of our down payment saved up too.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have gotten a joint checking account sooner. But then, I guess that’s all part of the newlywed learning experience.