“ If you’re married and have pulled this off, please leave a response.”

Okay, sure.

We have like 87 accounts and it works like this — my income is deposited into my checking account, his income is deposited into his checking account. I’m on his account but he’s not on mine (not for lack of trying. For lack of bank being able to do this one simple thing on two different occasions). From there the following things happen:

Every time I get paid (bi-weekly), I transfer $1500 to (joint) savings. That leaves me enough of a cushion to every month for automatic debits (my three different student loan payments, rental insurance, my phone, and our Boston Globe subscription) to happen without either of having to think about them. We try not to touch my checking account beyond this so that it also functions as a passive savings vehicle. If the balance ever grows beyond $5000, the plan is to transfer that extra to savings as well. But it’s the way we’ve figured out how to have a quickly accessible bit of money in case of some sort of emergency.

Every time he gets paid (15th and 30th every month), we budget the rest of our lives. One entire paycheck goes to rent. The other paycheck we live off of. We pay for electric, car payment, car insurance, his phone, and netflix out of his account every month. A further small amount (~$200) each month is further moved into sub-savings accounts earmarked for Christmas spending, potential cat-related vet bills, and travel.

This leaves us with roughly $1500 a month to spend on food and discretionary. And we just have a massive excel spreadsheet that tells us what we’ve spent and what we have left until next paycheck and we just sort it out based on that? Like I wanted some new spring clothes and JCrew was having a really good sale plus I had an extra 30% off thing. So we looked at the worksheet (which pre-figures in outings with friends or travel or whatever) and were like, yeah there’s some money there for new clothes. So I got some new clothes.

I guess it’s kind of like we live as though we have a single joint account even though we don’t. And we just try to be fair about things and kind to each other. I’m not going to care if he spends money on something he wants, he’s not going to care if I do so long as we’re both keeping it within the $1500/mth limit we’ve set. Big purchases (airfare, new mattress, whatever) we talk about and sort out which pool of money it make sense to take from. We are lucky in that most big purchases are structured around a fairly large bonus I get every year.