Shared bank accounts, and "fencing off" money

zoara

My wife and I have always had separate bank accounts, but with a baby on the way we’ll probably be earning very different amounts of money, so we want a shared account to help balance the contributions to the house and baby. We want to keep our wages going into our personal accounts, but want to transfer some (but not all) money to the shared account to pay for rent and food and so on. We’re not sure how much we’ll each transfer, and this will probably change about a bit as we work out how much is fair for each of us to contribute to shared costs and how much we want to keep for personal treats and savings and so on.

What we’d also like is to be able to have a flexible set of named “pots” which we use for short-term savings. So we might have one named “holiday” and one named “car”, and when we’ve saved enough we pay for whatever and get rid of the pot. I reckon we might have up to half a dozen of these on the go at any one time and they might last anywhere from a couple of months to a few years. I think we’d prefer quick access as well; if we have money in the “sofa” pot and a friend of a friend has a sofa to get rid of, waiting four days for a bank transfer (or fiddling with paying from elsewhere and being “owed” money by the sofa pot) doesn’t appeal. And managing half a dozen savings accounts (and keeping track of which is for what) definitely doesn’t appeal.

Interest rate doesn’t matter. We’ll be doing “proper” savings in a proper savings account. This is just for shorter term “fencing off” of smaller piles of money.

Intelligent Finance’s current account seemed to be ideal for this, but they no longer do it. Does anyone else do something similar, ie an account where you can “put aside” amounts of money in a pseudo-savings account kind of way?

Failing that, I guess the next best thing is to have any old shared current account and Intelligent Finance’s savings account (which does the pots but isn't a current account). We’ll just have to deal with IOUs if we need to raid one of the pots at short notice. Problem is, most of the recommended current accounts seem to assume they’re the “primary” account so have minimum amounts to be paid in. We don’t actually know how much will be going in yet, though I expect the minimum will be £500-600 and it will probably just about squeeze past the £1000. But that’s just a guess. Can anyone recommend a shared account that might suit?

Has anyone found another way of dealing with this? I assume partners having an account each and a shared account is fairly common, but I think our “labelled pots of money” thing is probably not so common.

Cheers!

sueeve

We are at the other end, retired,and we have personal bank accounts. We pay into a joint account for household, with the principal that we both have contributed durin work years, so the theory is that it is the money left over which is the same for each of us. So my husband pays in a little more than me, and this year both my small work pensions are frozen, while his are not, so he will be putting in a little more. If something unexpected happens we both shove in a little extra.
We have just had our 45th anniversary, so something must be working.

LillythePink

We have just done this but with bank accounts - we used to have personal ones where our salaries were paid into them, but we are now buying a house and have decided to pool all of our money together and split it out into different types of savings and give each of us the same amount of pocket money a month which can be for whatever we want.

We will have a holiday fund, a house fund, christmas/birthday fund and misc savings - we should be able to save about £1100 per month after mortgage, bills etc

We bank with Lloyds and have now a grand total of 4 joint savings accounts, 2 joint cheque accounts, 1 each of a current and a savings account - hub also has a uk based account where he pays his NI from (we live in Guernsey so offshore banking)

I also have an account with HSBC and was able to open a savings account online within about 30 seconds - don't know how many you can have though.

failing that, you could only open one, but manage the pots on a spreadsheet which totals up to the amount in the bank account and if you bank x amount for holidays, then just add that to the holiday column.

dzug1

ING certainly used to do it

withnell

Why not use the highest paying savings account, and use a spreadsheet to allocate the money into the various pots?

ian_h

You can open as many YBS Internet saver accounts as you want at a very reasonable rate of interest, Faster payments IN and cash cards if you want them?

Mark_In_Hampshire

Halifax enable you to set up savings accounts online so as to create "pots" of money (you can even name them e.g. holiday, income tax) and you can move money between them online immediately.

"Savings accounts" is however a grand description since the interest rate paid is next to nil.

zoara

Thanks for all the suggestions, there's a lot to look into. A quick couple of notes on things that have stood out.

The idea of going the opposite way - having all our money go into a shared account and taking out an "allowance" of spending money each appeals; however, the personal account I have has a requirement for a minimum payment in, I think. But sueeve, your point about "doing something right" is not an issue - we certainly don't argue about money (and haven’t done for seven years so far), but that's partly because we make sure we do what we both think is fair. I hope we can get to our 45th anniversary and still be saying the same thing

We don't want to have a spreadsheet to manage how much is saved for which items. It's that kind of note-taking and manual tracking that we're trying to avoid by getting accounts set up this way (I used to diligently track all my finances but it's become a chore). Same applies to naming the accounts - we don't want to have to remember that account 27654878 is for the baby furniture fund and 27654891 is for the car with the bigger boot; I think multiple accounts is too much overhead, really. Plus, my wife is both dyslexic and not at all techy, so we want it nice and simple with no cross-referencing of lists and tables and so on. She wants to know how much we’ve saved up without asking me!

I’m certainly up for ideas of how to have a (relatively) faff-free way of tracking this stuff manually, though. I’m thinking maybe one of those coin-sorter jobbies; make each penny represent a tenner, each time we add money to the “pots” account we add those pennies to the coin-sorter, and we can move pennies between the “stacks” to allocate it to different savings. Seems like there’s a risk of getting out of sync, though.

Anyway, you’ve given me a lot of suggestions to investigate, so thankyou for those; and thanks as well to people who suggested stuff that won’t work for us – it’s all appreciated as I’m interested in stuff I may not have thought of…

zoara

Oh, one more thing... Most suggestions are for savings accounts - we'd also need a current account, but one that doesn't require us to pay our wages into it. Any suggestions for that one? The top-ranking ones on the site seem to all require a wage to be paid in.

YBS Internet Saver seems to offer cashcards, but not direct debits and so on, which we'll need for paying the bills out of the shared account.

Mikeyorks

zoara wrote: »

The top-ranking ones on the site seem to all require a wage to be paid in.

.

That's not the case ......... 'deposit', for the most part, isn't the same as paying your salary in.

For example the Halifax Reward (£5 per month) and the LLoyds TSB Advantage (4% on balances between £5k - £7k) both require you to pay in £1k monthly, to achieve the bits I've put in brackets. But that can be a straight transfer from elsewhere - and then immediately removed back to wherever the parent account is.