Just Married

CheesyPeteza

I recently got married and my new wife and I are trying to sort out our financial arrangements.

We now have a joint Halifax Clarity Credit Card which we plan to use for shopping, anything for the house, holidays etc.

We also have a joint First Direct account to pay or mortgage and bills from.


The first direct bills account is easy to setup as we know pretty much what the outgoings will be every month so we can setup a standing order each to pay 50%.

I normally pay credit card bills in full every month via DD. We would like to set this up so 50% goes from my account and 50% from hers. But Halifax say they can't do this. They can setup 50% from one account, but the other 50% will have to be paid separately as you can only have one DD. This isn't ideal as I'd like it automated.


I am obviously not the first person to have to figure this all out, so I was wondering what setup do others have. Any suggestions of the best way to do it?

pinkteapot

We got married in June. We're actually doing it the old fashioned way - we no longer have separate accounts. Our salaries are paid into the joint account and all bills, credit card payments etc come out of it. No-one else seems to do this these days though.

I can't think of any way around your credit card issue. Could you have salaries paid into the joint account, bills and CC paid from it, and then each transfer left over money to your own accounts? Again that's not going to be automated though as the amount you take out will vary each month if your credit card bill isn't for a consistent amount.

MGCP

My wife and I bank separately, except for one joint account that we periodically each put a couple of hundred quid into to cover shopping, bills, meals out etc. At least we know if one of our banks had a crisis hopefully the other would still have access to their money to tide us over whilst things were resolved.

Similarly we keep our credit cards separate, but if one of us has paid for something like flights, it gets DD'd out of own account and we just ask the other to transfer 50% into the paying bank account to even things up again.

Of course philosophically we still think of it all as "our" money even though we keep most of it in separate places!

babyfruitella

pinkteapot wrote: »

We got married in June. We're actually doing it the old fashioned way - we no longer have separate accounts. Our salaries are paid into the joint account and all bills, credit card payments etc come out of it. No-one else seems to do this these days though.

I can't think of any way around your credit card issue. Could you have salaries paid into the joint account, bills and CC paid from it, and then each transfer left over money to your own accounts? Again that's not going to be automated though as the amount you take out will vary each month if your credit card bill isn't for a consistent amount.

You're not alone. We do this too. Everything is in joint names & was before we even married.

pmduk

Couldn't you set up a standing order to go once a month to cover the relevant amount?

nancy17

babyfruitella wrote: »

You're not alone. We do this too. Everything is in joint names & was before we even married.

Same here. We did it before getting married, people thought we were crazy but it has actually worked out for us.