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Household Budgets
JohnBoyUK
Posts: 9,124
Fairly simple question and I dont think this has ever come up in all the years of CL...
How do you work out who pays what in your household with your partner?
Do you put the same amount of money into a joint account?
Do you put the same percentage of your take home salary into a joint account?
Does one of you pay the mortgage and then the other pays the other bills?
Or do you do it a totally different way?
Having lived on my own for so many years, it appears my ideas for doing things financially are very different from my new partner, so am intrigued to know how others do it.
How do you work out who pays what in your household with your partner?
Do you put the same amount of money into a joint account?
Do you put the same percentage of your take home salary into a joint account?
Does one of you pay the mortgage and then the other pays the other bills?
Or do you do it a totally different way?
Having lived on my own for so many years, it appears my ideas for doing things financially are very different from my new partner, so am intrigued to know how others do it.
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I pay for everything. My wife pays the tv licence.
I AM A MUG!4 -
Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.2
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It's simple
Her money's hers
Your money hers
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We put the same amount into a joint account that covers the mortgage, utilities, shopping and childcare. For anything else, one of us will pick it up but we don't really keep tabs on it.0
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You get a better deal than me!carly burn said:I pay for everything. My wife pays the tv licence.
I AM A MUG!
Johnboy, quit your job and get her to pay everything. Will save this potential aggravation.2 -
I've learnt over the years that everyone has their own system. We started out with separate accounts, chipping in 50/50 for all household items. But we moved overseas and it suddenly was necessary to have one joint account...and that's how it has stayed, 29 years on...
Cash gets pooled and I guess we've been lucky that we've had enough to cover day-to-day spending plus the occasional jaunt to Hillsborough or (in the past) Old Trafford...
So 'different ideas' on how to do it are to be expected...you've just got to come to an understanding!0 -
Pay the TV licence? I can't even get my wife to do that!carly burn said:I pay for everything. My wife pays the tv licence.
I AM A MUG!0 -
Or base her contribution on the size of her tits.AFKABartram said:carly burn said:I pay for everything. My wife pays the tv licence.
I AM A MUG!
Johnboy, quit your job and get her to pay everything. Will save this potential aggravation.13 -
pretty much this really, our monthly outgoings are truly ridiculous when I actually look at the account!jamescafc said:Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.
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I pay mortgage and all the bills she buys the food shopping
Your now going to be skint forever johnboy
Money-root of all evil(and most of household arguments)0 -
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I've had to confiscate her debit card though as she has a habit of going drastically over budget. That's the problem with women and joint accounts. They overspend on themselves and get you to cover 50%+ of the cost.Elthamaddick said:
pretty much this really, our monthly outgoings are truly ridiculous when I actually look at the account!jamescafc said:Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.
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We have a joint account and I constantly worry about money and getting thru to the end of the month and have about 3 arguments a month about it.
I hope you'll both be very happy living together
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So when you said above - nice and easy and completely fair its not really is it?jamescafc said:
I've had to confiscate her debit card though as she has a habit of going drastically over budget. That's the problem with women and joint accounts. They overspend on themselves and get you to cover 50%+ of the cost.Elthamaddick said:
pretty much this really, our monthly outgoings are truly ridiculous when I actually look at the account!jamescafc said:Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.
Joint billing account for all bills, mortgage food shops - pay in an agreed sum, either the same amount or depends if one is a much bigger earner.
Keep what's left for yourself in your own account so it causes no arguments when you want to go out and spend on clothes/booze with mates etc as you are spending your own money. I'd hate to not have that independence to do what i liked without someone bitching at me.
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This.jamescafc said:
I've had to confiscate her debit card though as she has a habit of going drastically over budget. That's the problem with women and joint accounts. They overspend on themselves and get you to cover 50%+ of the cost.Elthamaddick said:
pretty much this really, our monthly outgoings are truly ridiculous when I actually look at the account!jamescafc said:Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.
Joint accounts dont work full stop.0 -
We only have the one joint account so everything goes in there.1
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It's fine after a few months of what cabbles refers to above. The only real element of overspend was with the food shopping, which is easily done given you sometimes buy for the sake of it due to a promotional. We now withdraw X amount of cash, within budget and leave cards at home.Curb_It said:
So when you said above - nice and easy and completely fair its not really is it?jamescafc said:
I've had to confiscate her debit card though as she has a habit of going drastically over budget. That's the problem with women and joint accounts. They overspend on themselves and get you to cover 50%+ of the cost.Elthamaddick said:
pretty much this really, our monthly outgoings are truly ridiculous when I actually look at the account!jamescafc said:Joint account. Pay in an amount that is proportional to our net salary. Nice and easy and completely fair.
Joint account for all bills, mortgage food shops - pay in an agreed sum, either the same amount or depends if one is a much bigger earner.
Keep what's left for yourself in your own account so it causes no arguments when you want to go out and spend on clothes/booze with mates etc as you are spending your own money. I'd hate to not have that independence to do what i liked without someone bitching at me.
Sounds extreme but I can relate to the petty arguments mentioned above and the cash idea seems to have sorted it.0 -
Joint account. I pay the lions (no pun intended) share as my missus works a 4 day week now due to kids. Out of that comes everything.
Works very well.0 -
One joint account. It works for us, but I can see why others do it differently.0
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When I was living with the wife (and 2 kids) I paid everything but that was ok as I was earning more money than I ever deserved. Now I am separated from the wife I do get to visit my furniture, bone china dinner service and sterling silver cutlery once a year on Christmas Day. It's an unofficial arrangement but is the one allowance given to me. I tend to see it as just penitence for the years of chasing money and the profligate way I managed to spunk it. I often have time to reflect nowadays on how much happier I am with just enough money to get by on, I know crazy ain't it?2
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We both have our own accounts, and pay into a joint account to cover the bills, childcare, etc. I need my own money to have my own independence, she'd be a nightmare if I had to take money from 'our' account.0
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Each to their own. Because of disproportionate salaries I've always paid mortgage/bills/cars + a bit of 'housekeeping' while she buys the food and contributes to joint savings to go towards home improvements/holidays (and tide me over when redundant :-( ). Worked well for us for 20+ years but I suspect we'll end up with a single joint account when retired.
Best thing (apart from to stop watching Spurs) is to sit down and agree the way forward - I know it sounds obvious but money causes a huge amount of arguments in relationships.
BTW, what is her view?0 -
one thing to realise very early on in a relationship, the whole premise of a relationship should be based on a fair approach to give and take. If one person is selfishly taking more, then you will have cracks there right from the start.
Personally i think the best approach is to ease your way into things, depending the circumstances of how things are coming about. If getting a place together, or saving for a place together, a seperate joint account you both pay a set amount into (either an even fix or percentage), whilst leaving you the surplus in your own account works best.
If you are moving into someone else's place, then i wouldn't set up any new joint accounts to switch bills to etc for a good 9 months, i would simply transfer them what you think is either an even split of the bills, or what is agreed to be a fair contribution if you pay less.
Minefield stuff this, would hate to be in a relationship where things like this were a contention point.0 -
Separate accounts, I pay the mortgage and all the bills, she pays for the food / clothes / child related stuff.0
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Pay same amounts into joint account to cover mortgage and all bills except Sky, which I pay for (a small price to pay to always win arguments about what to watch).
Rest of our monies we spend as individuals. I don't expect my other half to contribute to a golf weekend for me, and I certainly ain't paying half of around £200+ per month on her cigarettes.2 -
We both put an amount of money into our joint account. We both live on a joint credit card and that also gets taken out of this account.
To be honest my wife deals with that side of things and we get by. I don't think it's exactly the same amount that we pay but we leave ourselves just about enough to get through on incidental costs.
At the end of the day we are married so our debt is shared, assets are shared so it's different.
To be honest I have no idea how we would split that if I were to move into a new relationship at this stage of my life.
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Also makes a massive difference if you are a one income or two income household how you arrange things.1
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The wife earns it and I decide how we spend it.0
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I seem to be in the minority here as my wife and I genuinely share our money without thought of whose money it is. We pay both salaries into a joint account and all the bills, food shopping, petrol etc comes out of that account. We also transfer a fixed amount each month into a separate joint account and that's our joint spending money (purely to avoid accidentally spending too much and not having enough left to pay a bill).
Given that I take home roughly twice what the Mrs earns this might seem like I'm a mug but she looks after our child (soon to be children) and does the majority of the housework, takes care of the food shopping etc and, to me, that more than makes up for any seeming inequity in our earnings and spending.0 -
wife and I have a joint account, makes life so much easier, so although we earn different amounts it's all 'our' money. as my mother-in-law also lives with us we also have a household account into which we each contribute the same amount each month to cover ALL household expenses.0
