Pratik

Nerve Endings Firing Away

Individual Responsibilities for Household Finances

I read this on Twitter and thought I should share how we do it…the household finances, I mean.

One of my pet peeves is women who are either not allowed to manage personal finance or who actively do not take an interest. Unfortunately, this is true regardless of income and education level in my anecdotal evidence. So thought I should share how we divvy up the responsibility, so it’s not on one person 💸

We each still have our personal checking accounts in our household, although we have access to each other’s online accounts (credit cards, banking, brokerage, and pension funds) 1. We have listed each other as beneficiaries to make it legal. I’m responsible for tracking daily and monthly expenditure via Mint. Her credit score is higher than mine. Slightly but higher.

Including store cards, we have a total of 6 credit cards 2. She’s the primary on two of those. Since I arrived in this country before she did, we have retained some cards from those early days to extend our “length of credit history.” She is added as an authorized user on all my credit cards and hers.

At the end of the month, I enter the amounts due into a spreadsheet that my wife uses to pay our credit card balances (in full) from her checking account at the end of each month. If she falls short, I cover the rest from mine (the spreadsheet is set up to auto-calculate that amount).

I’m responsible for paying the mortgage, utilities, and a couple of monthly recurring charges best paid directly from checking to avoid fees. The only other thing she pays directly from her checking account is the bi-weekly cleaning maids. My checking account is linked to our retirement, brokerage, savings, and our son’s college savings account. I keep track of these direct withdrawals from my checking account in Soulver to make minor changes month-to-month.

I research investments and monthly investments. Most of our movable assets are in index funds, so everything is automated. A little over 2% are invested in individual stocks (via Robinhood) to scratch that itch of active investing and participating in IPOs (or even crypto). As long as I am not day-trading with large sums of money, she lets me handle this without much supervision. Luckily, both of us are conservative investors.

My wife does our taxes. We use TurboTax. I review them before we file just so it has a second pair of eyes (since we file it jointly, I should be reviewing it anyway). The refund (or payment) goes to our joint savings account. We have already done our estate planning, including medical power-of-attorney and mentioning details of our son’s guardianship if neither of us is around.

All significant financial decisions are made jointly. I say significant because neither of us asks permission for daily personal expenses. So I’m not keeping an eye on her clothing purchases, and she’s not raising her eyebrows on my app subscriptions and hobbyist purchases. If a particular month’s expenses are higher than average, we talk about it, and thanks to Mint, we often know what caused it exactly.

Finally, household finances should and must be handled jointly whether each person wants to or not. You should expect your partner to share this responsibility, and trust me; it will be helpful for that partner in the long term. You wouldn’t want to start learning only after the other person is not around. You should trust your partner but verify the financial part regularly. This is particularly important for women who traditionally have entrusted their husbands, sometimes to disastrous consequences.

It’s a life skill high on the priority list of things of “adulting,” like it or not. These skills may not be directly taught in school, but they teach you math, so there’s no reason not to apply those skills. Although time management and prioritizing your tasks are also not taught in school, it’s often the hallmark of most successful individuals.


  1. One downside is that we can no longer surprise each other with gifts that we buy with our credit cards. “What was this charge made yesterday?” - is a common shout every other morning.

    We have come to an understanding to not check accounts close to our birthdays, anniversary, and Christmas. ↩︎

  2. This number may be higher than average but we use different cards for different purposes to lower skimming risk and to maximize cashback points. Anyway, we have never exceeded more than 10% of our credit limit at the end of the billing cycle. ↩︎


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