My partner Sam and I had been dating for about three years when the conversation about opening a joint bank account came up. We weren’t married at the time, but we had just started living together after moving to Canada for a working holiday.
Until then, we split most things evenly. Sam had always earned more money than I did, but I was determined to pay my own way. Often, he would treat me to dinner or a movie, but I tried to reciprocate as much as possible.
When we moved in together in Canada, dividing up all of our shared expenses seemed like unnecessary work. Neither of us could be bothered keeping a spreadsheet of costs or using a calculator to work out who owed what for groceries and rent.
He brought up the idea of a joint bank account
“Why don’t we just open a joint bank account?” Sam said one night on the couch while playing Xbox. It wasn’t the first time the topic had come up — Sam had suggested it a few months before we moved in together, and I was hesitant.
To me, the prospect of having a shared bank account sounded so weird and grown-up. I was pretty immature at 25, and back then, I thought that joint bank accounts were something that only married couples had, along with a station wagon and a mortgage.
However, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. So, one afternoon after work, Sam and I marched down to the local Bank of Montreal branch on Banff Avenue with our IDs in hand and opened our first-ever shared bank account. I remember walking outside afterward and snapping a photo together, laughing. It was a milestone in our relationship that I’d never really thought about before that point.
Courtesy of Melissa Noble
Pooling our money changed our relationship
Straight away, something shifted in our relationship. It wasn’t just about the convenience of having a joint account, like being able to pay bills or save money more efficiently. There was this sense that we were on the same page. We were pooling our resources, making joint financial decisions, and truly functioning as a team.
To start off, we each transferred a set amount into the shared bank account each week to go towards our living expenses and savings goals for a three-month trip around South America. Call us naive, but we didn’t even set any ground rules around spending or have a conversation about what would happen if we broke up. We were in a pretty good place in our relationship at the time, and we both trusted each other to do the right thing.
A year later, when we moved from Canada to the UK, we used the same system of opening a joint account and transferring a set amount into it, then again when we returned home to Australia. It worked so well for us, and made living together, traveling, and navigating expenses a lot less complicated.
We have a system for dealing with money, and it works for us
After we got married, Sam and I did some reading about money management and decided to set up a few different accounts — one for our regular expenses, one each for our fun money (activities, meals out, entertainment, etc.), and one for our savings and investments. This financial management strategy has proven to be invaluable and has helped us to budget and live within our means.
We’ve now been married for over a decade, and we still use the same system. We know couples who keep their finances completely separate, and though it works for them, this is what’s worked for us. We’re raising a family together and working toward shared financial goals, so managing our money together just made sense to us.
Looking back, I think one of the biggest game-changers for our relationship wasn’t moving in together or even getting married. Surprisingly, it was opening a shared bank account. That was the turning point — the moment we decided to work as a team toward a shared financial goal.
