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How do you structure your day to day spending? Do you have a joint checking/savings/credit card setup, keep things separate or a hybrid approach? We’re based in the US and want optimize for simplicity.
If you want simplicity, go for a joint checking and savings, if there's a personal goal to be saved for by one of you, see if your bank offers 'vaults' that we can squirrel money away until you can purchase the camera or car part or whatever it is. Keeping most things in one place generally maximizes simplicity.
For large items we’ll transfer back and forth as needed and one person makes the payment.
My partner and I have very different spending habits, and seeing that line-by-line would cause daily friction.
Having them separated gives us both discretion and autonomy.
We have "calibrated" the direct deposit amounts to minimize the need to move money across the accounts. If money "backs up" in one or the other, we move it into investments, but month-to-month, practically everything is on autopilot.
I think that's about as operationally simple as it gets, which was also a huge priority for us.
Savings and investments are all consolidated and jointly-owned wherever possible and I maintain a periodic (slightly more than quarterly) update of that manually by looking at the Vanguard, Etrade, Fidelity, etc accounts.
* The third credit card account is a Chase Amazon account for the better cash back on that card. It's only used for Amazon, so it's easier to spot anything unusual.
- Our salary goes to our individual savings accounts.
- A shared checkings account gets topped up to $5000 every month, proportionally to both of our salaries, to optimize for equal purchasing power when buying shared stuff.
- We don't really budget anything because we save quite a bit, but we do classify all bank transactions into a few categories and look at a month-by-month matrix every few months.
- Both the topping up and generating the analytics are automated processes, so it's pretty headache-free.