Here Are 3 Reasons You Absolutely Should Share a Bank Account With Your Spouse

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Sharing a bank account with your spouse makes a lot of sense. Be sure to check out these three reasons why research shows it’s often a good idea. 

Marriage is both a life partnership and an economic partnership. Whether you combine finances or not, the financial decisions you and your partner make will inevitably impact each other.

If you’re trying to decide whether to merge your financial lives fully by opening a joint account at a bank, there’s research to suggest this is the right approach. A study recently published in the Journal of Economic Research found that a shared account could help newlyweds sustain relationship quality over the first two years of marriage. Meanwhile, the study found that those who kept their money separate experienced declines in their relationship quality during that same period.

Why would sharing an account make such a difference? There were three reasons identified in the study — all of which are good reasons why sharing a checking account or savings account with your spouse makes sense.

1. A shared account improves how each spouse feels about money management

A joint account can help a couple maintain a stronger relationship because it improves how each person feels about handling money.

Trying to manage your entire financial life on your own can be stressful. There are tons of little decisions you make every day that can have a big impact on your future. If you have a joint account, you have someone to bounce things off of and someone to help keep you accountable.

Pooling your resources together also means there’s more money to go around. You have a larger pot of cash that you can use to do things, which can make you feel less stressed about money than if you each have separate accounts you have to allocate to different things.

When my husband and I combined our accounts after years of marriage, we noted this benefit right away. We each worried less about how we were going to cover our share of the bills because we knew we had each other’s backs.

2. A shared account promotes shared goals

Putting your money into one account has another major benefit: It makes it easier to work toward a shared goal together, rather than you each having the separate goals you’re trying to accomplish.

Say, for example, one of you has credit card debt. That debt could easily be seen as your spouse’s problem if you have separate accounts and they came into the marriage with it. But it impacts the total amount of money coming into your household since some of it is going toward interest.

If you’ve combined your financial lives, it’s debt you can both work to pay. You’ll be in it together, and be more likely to get it paid off faster so you can devote your shared income to other things.

3. A shared account promotes adherence to communal norms

Communal norms are linked to higher relationship satisfaction. Basically, when you adhere to communal norms, you and your spouse each respond to each other’s needs without expecting reciprocity. If you fill up your spouse’s car with gas because you know they hate pumping it, you do it to be nice — not because you want them to fill up your tank tomorrow.

A shared bank account has been found to promote adherence to communal norms because you get used to working as a team on things and balancing each other’s needs. You aren’t divvying up the bills and tracking who owes what.

Now, all of these benefits are absolutely great reasons to combine accounts with your spouse. However, before you move forward, you’ll want to be sure you’ve had some discussions and are on the same page about how you’ll handle the responsibilities of managing money together. You’ll want to be sure you can trust your partner to use the money wisely and that you have some ground rules in place for deposits and withdrawals.

If you have had conversations about how your shared account will work and you feel like you can trust your spouse, you should seriously consider opening that joint account ASAP so you can reap these three big benefits.

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