THE SINGLE CHECKING ACCOUNT

HAVING A SINGLE CHECKING ACCOUNT

Debt is anything owed. Debt can be very short-term, like ordering a meal and having to pay for it before you leave, or long-term, like buying a house with a 30-year mortgage. Whatever you have to pay is a debt. your debt is enough to worry about. However, any debt is too much if you're not completely comfortable with it. If you can't easily pay all your bills every month, or if you carry a balance on any of your credit cards.

It may seem corny and dated in today’s dual-income families where both wage earners enjoy a hearty measure of independence, but single checking-account families with one spouse in charge of all bill paying were the norm throughout most of America’s history. For all its seeming obsolescence, the singleaccount approach has some advantages.
The most important benefit is the certainty it provides. One spouse pays all the bills and thus knows how much to budget for household expenses and has a firm sense of when each bill is due.

Bill paying becomes a regular, predictable function; bills are likely to be paid on time and in full, without the annoyance and expense of late payment fees.
The second advantage of this approach is that it can play to the strengths of the couple. What we mean is that the skills associated with money management and bill paying are not necessarily divided equally. If one spouse excels at it and the other has little interest or aptitude in these matters, it may be logical to entrust a single checking account to one spouse only.

However, the downsides of the single-account system are equally obvious. Most importantly, the spouse without checkbook control may feel powerless, to say nothing of penniless. Nothing can prove more harmful to a marriage than a growing sense of dependence on the part of one spouse; in many cases, the single-account approach causes or deepens this divide.

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