Bank Accounts and Paying Bills: How We Handle It
Money is such a weird topic
I mean some people get really weird when you talk about money, I think there is a saying “money makes people funny” if that’s not a saying then I just came up with something cool and I will take full credit for it.
Money used to make me uncomfortable too, whenever someone would talk about money I could feel my face getting red. One I didn’t have a lot of money and two the money I did have I wasted on tobacco and booze. Money was also an uncomfortable subject between my wife and me when we first started dating she only worked part time. I mean very part time, only a few hours a week doing private swim lessons. So I made most of the money(which wasn’t much) and she contributed where she could.
Once we both had full-time jobs money was better but all of the bills were in my name and I found myself broke all the time while she still had money to spend. She did contribute but I felt it wasn’t fair. So I told her we needed to sit down and have an honest conversation about bills and bank accounts.
So Who Pays What?
I proposed an idea that I got either from a book my mom bought me or from my mom herself(don’t tell her I’m giving her credit or I will never hear the end of it). The premise is simple: total up the income between the two of you (person A and person B) and then divide the highest salary (person A) by the total. This will give person A the percentage that they make out of the total, then subtract that from 1 and that is the percentage that person B makes of the total. Here it is in equation form
Person A Income 60K
+
Person B Income 40K
=
Total Income 100K
Then
Person A Income 60K
/
Total Income 100K
=
.6 or 60%
Then
1 — .6 =.4 or 40%
If math is not your thing or you don’t want to think then go to the bottom of the post and make a copy of the Google sheet I created for you that will figure this out for you.
Person A will pay 60% of all the monthly bills and person B will pay 40%. This keeps it as fair as possible between different income levels so that one person does not spend all of their check on bills and the other has all the free cash.
What bills do we pay?
Now that we have determined how much each person has to contribute toward the monthly bills we needed to figure out what those bills were. We created a Google sheet (I have a template I created for you at the bottom of this post) and added all of our household bills. We included gym memberships, car payments, the mortgage and so on; basically, everything that was paid every month went on the sheet. At the bottom was a total that was then divided by how much each person had to pay. So if all bills totaled $100 a month person A would pay $60 and person B would pay $40.
Next, we needed to figure out how we were going to pay the bills.
Bank Accounts: But I wanna have my own spending money!
My wife and I were both used to having our own bank accounts and always knowing how much we had in each account and we didn’t want to change having our own spending money. If my wife wants to buy some in fashion dishes or decorations with her money then she could and it would not affect how much spending money I have and if I wanted to go buy this sweet Klipsch home theater system and had the money in my account I could and it would not affect her cash situation. All of the bills were covered and we were free to do what we wanted to our own money guilt free.
This has saved us on countless arguments about who is spending the “extra” money in a joint bank account. While from time to time I still say “please stop buying those stupid dishes” it really doesn’t matter because she is using her money and all of our bills are still paid.
So with that in mind we went the bank and opened a joint checking account, a joint savings account, a checking, and savings account for me, and a checking and savings account for her. Automatically from each of our paychecks the amount we need to add the joint checking or Bill Pay account as we call it is deposited directly so we do not have to worry about putting money in that account. And when the bills come due we know we have the money in the back to cover it. So not only does this make the money fair it also gives us peace of mind that the money is there.
What about saving money?
We do save money and not spend all of the free money. We have joint savings account that we both put a little bit in and we each have personal saving accounts as well. In addition to that, we both have retirement accounts from our employer and I have a self-managed IRA account. In a separate post, I will go over what I do in my self-managed IRA.
Something has recently come to my attention lately and that is high-interest savings accounts. I also have a high-interest Barclays account but I will be switching to a Beam high-interest savings account. I will earn a 2–4% APY and have no fees. It is still in Beta right now but click HERE to use my referral link to sign up and reserve your spot.
In the end, you will need to do what is right for your family but if you a looking for a simple way to pay monthly household bills this may be the way for you.
Here is the Google sheet to calculate this for you, if you have questions shoot me an email hi@themodernmanlyman.net
This post contains affiliate links, which means I receive compensation if you make a purchase using a link in this post
Originally published at The Modern Manly Man. Which is hosted on Kona Domains
