Consolidating Accounts

Alexbark86

My wife and I are looking to consolidate all of our accounts into one joint account. We both currently have individual accounts with Lloyds, and have a main joint account with Santander for our household bills as well as a dormant Barclays joint account.

We would like to have both of our salaries, individual direct debits and joint direct debits coming from the same account. We would also like to take advantage of the best switching offer.

Would it be best to do a current account switch from our joint account and then individually change all of our own personal direct debits? Are there any good joint current account switch offers out there at the moment?

eskbanker

To the best of my knowledge, pretty much all switching offers are available for joint accounts as well as sole ones, but you can often double up and each earn a switching bonus for switching a sole account, which might be worth doing before (or as well as) consolidating…

friolento

Having all your eggs in one basket might not be the smartest idea. What if there is an issue with the one account you have? It generally is a good idea to have accounts with different, unrelated, banks.

Also, if you are consolidating everything into one account means you get one switch bonus. Whilst you could probably get several if you keep your accounts separate. Switch offers come and go - to exploit as many as possible, you need to keep on the ball but also be patient, and it's a good idea to have one or two spare accounts ready for switching at any point in time.

None of the above stops you from having a joint account for your bills, and Santander is one of the better ones for this as it pays cashback on DDs, and possibly also offers you access to good savings accounts.

tom192

Worth keeping a joint account open with a different institution and preferably different card provider (Visa/MasterCard just incase of any issues with your main account.

You may not feel this is needed if you have credit cards etc but just something to consider to ensure access to funds incase of any issues

StewedApple

My wife and I are looking to consolidate all of our accounts into one joint account.

As others have commented, this may not be a good idea at all - unintentionally you are creating a single point of failure:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_point_of_failure

You may want to rationalise payments for household accounts into a single joint account but you should think very carefully about the consequences should there be an outage with whichever service you bank with.