I was hoping to get some ideas on what methods you use to split bills between your partner and you. Not so much what the final split is but what system you use and how it works for you.
We are not married so don’t want a joint account! That will be the end goal though. One day.
What we currently do is: I have all the bills in my name and I add them to a shared tab and my partner pays them as and when they come in. The problem is, I need to have the full cost of all the bills to pay them before he can give me the money and sometimes I can’t afford to pay all the bills (even for that 1 or 2 days before he sends me the money). Hope I’m making sense!!
So I was wondering what you guys do, if there’s another method on Monzo I’m missing or if there’s a bank that can help us manage this better?
The system I’ve always used, even with Monzo and now with HSBC is this.
She has the bills in her name, that’s because when we met she had the house and now we have one together but I send her half the bills money by transfer each month.
I trust she’s paying it fine since no one’s turned the power off yet
We used to be in similar position, But we took the plunge and opened a joint account for simplicity.
I used to cover bills, him cover rent, and then send him the difference but it was overly complex for many reasons.
I built a spreadsheet to show the breakdown, what I paid, he paid, the difference, and how I accumulated to paying him X amount to make it all balance. It still wasn’t clear enough so we got the joint account.
Both pay in £600 each, covers everything for house and cats, and some groceries/fuel.
Been together 5.5 years, lived together around 4.5 of those, maybe a bit longer.
The shared tab stuff was tried but seemed to get a little too complex, opposed to just paying the difference in total or just both pay into one account where we can both see the spending and can’t dispute anything.
Doesn’t work for everyone but absolutely works for us.
@Carlo1460 Thanks! Are you married? I’ve always been turned off at the idea of getting a joint account without being married… I want to make sure my money is protected. And of course I trust my boyfriend but still just want to be sensible just in case.
You think it’s a good idea to open a joint account without being married first?
All the household bills are in my name. Partner pays into joint account a vast proportion of his salary and he has joint account card and spends at will. Most of my income goes into joint account also, and I spend at will. Been together 33 years and married for 13, No spreadsheets, Trust each other implicitly. R-
We are not married, don’t think I would ever want to be to be honest
But as for the joint account, we put in what we both spend as we trust each other enough to not detriment one another ie not pay the rent as it will impact us both, or not pay the other bills of risk of being cut off.
While the majority is in my name, I don’t feel he would ever empty the account in that manner.
We only pay in the bills each month to cover the important things, salary and personal spending is kept to our own accounts and we do as we please with it otherwise.
I’m not at a stage where I would pay all my wage into the joint account, I think quite a few here are also on that page for one reason or another, I like to be somewhat independent on my finances as does my other half.
Paying what we need on to keep a roof over our heads is where the line was put. We do also split other costs like meals out etc but we generally pay those from personal and request from the other (not always the case though, it balances out month end really).
We just worked out the total we spend on all the household bills and then we allocated direct debits so we paid half the total value each.
For us that means he pays the mortgage and groceries and I pay absolutely everything else. It’s about even and saves him having to deal with people which he absolutely hates doing.
We’ll occasionally to a check of the total we each pay a month just to confirm it’s equal or proportionate to our current wages.
We each have our own personal accounts and money, the joint money/account being a secondary one.
All household bills and expenses that are 50/50 go from our joint account, we each pay the same amount into the joint account every month. Each one of us can then buy all the motorcycles… I mean, manage their own personal expenditure independently.
However, lately we have been using a Monzo shared tab, mostly because we have one bill (BT) of which I pay a larger % (because I am the geek who wants the gigabit), and also because we use Chase for the cashback even for joint card purchases.
The shared tab has also come in handy as my wife wanted a second dog, which I most certainly did not , so she pays for any large pet shop purchases and splits them accordingly!
We have separate areas of responsibility, with a standing agreement that if the lesser earner (me, by a large margin) needs something covering due to extenuating circumstances then the other will transfer the funds.
It works out well as we have very different approaches to normal spending and don’t want to have to deal with each other’s methods.
Not at all sure what a joint account has to do with being married?
I pay almost all the bills. They all come from a bills pot, so I can easily see how much they are each month, and then my partner just sends me the proportion of that total that we agreed upon each month as soon as he’s been paid. I put it straight into the bills pot, and put my proportion in once I’m paid as well.
It takes a bit of set up getting everything to come out of the bills pot, and you have to work out the amount once at the start and then adjust if any of your bills change, but it works very well for us and is minimal effort to maintain.
This is how we’ve always done it, it’s just less work with Monzo as I used to have a separate bank account with another bank and have to manually work out my upcoming bills.
7-year relationship and lived together since 2019. The way I’ve done things since day one and what seems to work best is we add our salaries together to show what household income is and who provided what percent of this income.
Bills are paid from a joint account and each person transfers their percent (based on their contribution to the household income) to the joint account each payday.
I pay for grocery shopping myself as I do all the cooking and therefore if I want to push the boat out and go high-end I can and my partner pays for other items such as the dog. Has always seemed fair to us both, never created any issues and allows us to know each month how much disposable we’ll be left with.
My partner and I have always been paid into our personal accounts and then transferred enough to cover shared bills and general spending, as well as some for joint savings for the likes of holidays or a new car.
However we’re now expecting a baby so have decided to flip our method on it’s head.
After the baby arrives we have decided to have both our salaries paid into the joint account, set money aside for bills, spending and savings, and then transfer equal amounts into our personal accounts for us to spend or save as we wish.
We think this makes it fairer as ultimately one person is going to have to give up some of their earning potential to look after the kid, and that allows the other to maintain their earning potential.
We see both roles to be equally valuable and dependent on the other so we both get the same amount of fun money transferred to our personal accounts.
We’ll give it a go anyway and see how it works for us.
, so she pays for any large pet shop purchases and splits them accordingly!