The key to success, though, is to always maintain a balance in your joint checking account which is sufficient to cover 1 month’s expenses.

Example: If you know that your monthly expenses are usually around $4,000 and you make $5,000/month, then you should have $4,000 in the bank on thelast day of the month (assuming you get paid on the 1st and 15th). When you get paid on the first of the month, you will have $4,000 + $2,500. By the 15th, you will have spent down some of the account (say $2000 for the first half of the month), but you will get paid again and you can replenish the account (hopefully you will have $4,000 + $2,500 – $2,000 + $2,500 = $7,000. Then at the end of the month (after you spend the remaining $2,000 of monthly expenses) you will end up with $5,000 on the last day of the month. Then you can transfer $1,000 to long term savings and start the process over with the remaining $4,000. This works perfectly so long as your income exceeds your expenses (which it should). This way, there is virtually no way you can overdraw your account (unless you REALLY blow your budget) and you should always have something left at the end of the month to transfer to savings.

True, you could get a higher yield by keeping the money in a savings account, but the peace of mind of never bouncing a check or getting an overdraft and the savings from only having 1 account instead of 2 tends to offset the $10/month or so of lost interest.

i handle the finances in our family and all paychecks are direct deposited into my checking account. after all bills are paid, allowances are distributed and the rest goes into savings. we initially did it this way because my husband isn’t exactly a whiz with money and he thought he would do better receiving a set amount each payday.

it works so far!

I am annoyed at how much companies move their due dates around.

I would like to point out that the problem of not knowing exactly how much money you have to spend can happen with single person with a single account as well. Large bills change in amount and due dates can move around due to changes in the billing cycle.

One thing we are trying right off the bat is to get any large and regular payments that we can’t control the due date of out of our joint account.

On Pay Day our savings comes out automatically and we will transfer the amount needed to cover those large and regular bills to a separate place. Any other debts we have (credit card right now) can be sent on the pay day before it is due.

We also have a line of credit $1000 we can go into if we make a mistake. I’m not sure I would follow this plan if a mistake ended up in an overdraft fee!