Just curious - who does the bills/budget in your house?

[macuserftw]

I've been living with my boyfriend for a year now and I'm the one who handles the household budget. We have separate bills, credit cards, and bank accounts and we plan to keep it that way. We pay our individual bills separately, but household expenses (rent, utilities, groceries) are split about 50/50. I pay the utilities and cell phone bill for both of us, but he pays the grocery bill every week. If we go out to eat then we take turns. We are both very concious about our money and credit so, we've never had an argument about finances (or anything, really) yet.

In fact, we do just about everything 50/50 - including household chores. For example, I'll cook dinner and he will do the dishes afterwards. We both work full time and this system of sharing household responsibilities equally just works out very well.

[Anonymous]

I've been with my BF for almost 7 years now. We just bought a home in June. Money-wise everything is communal. We don't and have never budgeted, but we're pretty frugal/don't have a lot of spending. All our bills are on autopay out of joint bank accounts. We have quite a few bank accounts scattered around to keep the college fee-free accounts and accounts opened for bonuses. We always keep the bill-paying joint accts stacked with more than enough cash for all the bills to pay out of. I manually pay the Mortgage, Homeowner's Ins, Prop Tax, HOA fees because we can't autopay those. All our spending/purchase decisions are made together/agreed upon. We check in with all our credit cards/bank accounts every few weeks to make sure we know what bills are coming up and how much each bank account holds/whether it's enough or not. We choose which credit card to use by rewards/cash back promos, whether something is charged on his card or mine does not matter.

[Focused10]

I handle all bills, budgets and such. I'm the wife...over 20 years married.

[capitalkid]

I handle all the Budgeting(wife).  I run it through a spreadsheet monthly.  Have them done out 6 mo MO Plus.  I have it all setup however, so if someone needed to take over in case of accident whatever, it is easily done, and easy to follow.  

[Anonymous]

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@capitalkid wrote:

I handle all the Budgeting(wife).  I run it through a spreadsheet monthly.  Have them done out 6 mo MO Plus.  I have it all setup however, so if someone needed to take over in case of accident whatever, it is easily done, and easy to follow.  

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Pretty much the same here. Except I'm the Husband. I keep 3 seperate logbooks (Short, Mid, Long-term budgets) and sets of notepad files and a master list of all our online accounts/passwords is kept in our floor safe.

[barbaralee]

When my husband and I were seriously dating and he first moved out of the dorms and into his own apartment I remember it quite clearly. He had moved ahead of me, and it would be another 3 months before I moved to the new state with him. We were on Skype, and he was stressed because he had gotten a *gasp* electric bill along with a *double gasp* cable bill. My husband is very into his field of study, and I think a part of him thought he would continue on similar to how he did it in undergrad: make one payment (credit card) and then get to spend the rest of his day either with 1) me 2) his friends 3) researching his field of study. He was always good with money in the sense that he is frugal, doesn't spend needlessly, and saves everything he has, but when he got those bills he acted like it was the most overwhelming thing in the world. 

So I took over the finances that day going forward. Everything, from utilities to credit cards. I also started applying for credit cards for him and telling him which one to use (a practice we still do). He told me from the beginning: I don't care what you do with the finances, just as long as I do not pay any interest. To this day he has never paid a dime of interest in his life. He has become a little bit more proactive. He became even more frugal than what he was before, making it more of a lifestyle. It was his idea to stop driving his car and to switch cell phone providers to cut costs. We also discuss together how much we are going to put into savings/investments. Big ticket items are also talked through before any purchases are made. Every once in a while he will check the bank account (although he can never remember the PW) but other than having his say in the direction he would like to see our finances go, my husband has taken a real hands off approach.