Joint Life, Joint Accounts?
Ah the joys of married life. Its the opportunity to build a life together with someone very special. However before this journey begins you get to purge all duplicate and extraneous belongings. The process can be very satisfying, sort of like a new semester in school or the start of a new year.
One question that is soon to arise is whether to purge duplicate bank accounts.
Multiple other bloggers have written posts about this.(see joint accounts) It is one of the common issues that arrises as people get married. 
My wife and I decided for the time being that we will keep our separate checking accounts. We will do this for the time being for a few reasons:
- We both use the same bank with direct deposit and free checking so it doesn’t cost us anything to keep the accounts open.
- We converted both of the accounts to joint accounts so both checking accounts show up when we logon to pay bills etc.. This makes for easy communication about where we need to move money if we need to.
- We will each send the (hopefully) extra money each month into a joint savings account.
One account that we will use jointly however will be a credit card account. This will allow us to accumalate points etc.. much more quickly than we did before. This will also make it easier to track our spending with only one credit card statement to download and track.
I do think that a good reason to maintian some individual accounts is that if something were to happen unexpectanly to one of us, the other would not need to rebuild a credit history etc…
Any other thoughts on the subject?
