2 months ago
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Business|Love and Money: Why Sharing Accounts Is Good for Your Relationship
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/business/couples-finances-bank-accounts.html
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When Nia Darville Stokes-Hicks and Armondi Stokes-Hicks married two years ago, they set up five bank accounts.
Each had an individual bank account for personal spending, and they shared a checking account for paying household bills. They had a joint savings account. And they had yet another account for money the couple set aside to use together. They weren’t unusual — 34 percent of couples have a mix of accounts, and 23 percent keep their finances entirely separate, according to a YouGov poll conducted three years ago for CreditCards.com.
With American couples marrying later in life, according to the Census Bureau, maintaining separate accounts has become more common than it once was. By the time most people reach their late 20s and early 30s, they’ve been working for six or more years, have set up their own checking and savings accounts, have established credit and might even own a home or a brokerage account. Often people want to maintain their own financial independence after marriage, but experts say this isn’t necessarily a good idea, especially if you’re thinking about long-term goals like saving for retirement.
“Gone are the days when couples get married right out of school and open up their first bank account together and learned together how to manage money,” said Bill Nelson, founder of Pacesetter Planning in Arlington, Va.
Having separate accounts made it more difficult to see the household’s total financial picture, said Mr. Stokes-Hicks, 28, a former Netflix writers’ production assistant who works as a Starbucks supervisor and lives in Jefferson County, Colo. He and his wife agreed to simplify their finances last year when they realized they weren’t using their individual bank accounts — they were spending with their credit cards and paying them off using the household bills account.
Now they share three accounts: a high-yield savings account, a checking account for household bills and another savings account. Both are enrolled in employer-sponsored retirement plans.
