The Bill Account

One of my biggest problems, like I mentioned in a previous post, is that I have a habit of spending on things I don't need. When we have extra money we tend to forget that the money is already spent, and go 'Ooh, look...we have 100 dollars! Let's go _____.' Fill the blank with dinner, craft projects, etc. You would think that after doing this over and over again we would realize that we're doing it wrong, but we don't. 

My husband thought of a plan though to stop this from happening. We decided to open up a joint account that we would transfer our money for bills to, and only touch it for bills. If this happens we would not have any issues with going over or being under. This sounds like a brilliant idea!

So now, once the money in our personal bank accounts is gone, it's gone. We won't have to worry about accidently spending the electric bill money on dinner, or worrying if the credit card payment is going to bounce. Since it will only have bill transactions it will also be easier to see if everything went through since the balance should be zero once all the bills go through.

We were also discussing that we're going to transfer partial bills to the account. For example, we get paid bi-weekly, so lets say rent is $1000, and we each get paid every other week.

Pay Days

September 14th (mine)

September 14th (his)

September 28th (mine)

September 28th (his)

So that's 4 pay checks between now and rent, so $1000 / 4 = $250. So it will look like this in the bill account:

September 14th (mine) +$250 / $250

September 14th (his) +$250 / $500

September 28th (mine) +$250 / $750

September 28th (his) +$250 / $100

October 1st (rent due) - $1000 / $0

We'd do this for all the bills though, so it would look like this:

September 14th (mine) +$250 / $250 rent | +$75 / $75 phone | + $40 / $40 electric

September 14th (his) +$250 / $500 rent | +$75 / $150 phone | + $40 + $80 electric

September 16th (phone due - $150) - $150 / $0 phone

September 28th (mine) +$250 / $750 rent | +$40 / $120 electric

September 28th (his) +$250 / $1000 rent | +$40 / $160 electric

October 1st (rent due - $100) - $1000 /$0 rent

October 5th (electric due - $160) - $160 / $0 electric

Otherwise what we usually do is:

September 14th (his & mine) - Oh look, only the phone is due! - $150

September 28th (his & mine) - Crap! We need $1000 for the rent AND $160 for the electric...we're broke!

Yeah. It's not fun.