One area that I’ve tried to work on throughout my five-plus years of married life is our finances.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the best when it comes to saving and that I have some less-than-ideal shopping habits (hello, Amazon Prime). As time goes on, I’ve realized that I am terrible about paying bills on time and that I like to see and manage only the money I can spend. A wonderful perk of Mac’s Army paycheck is that we can set up monthly allotments or change the amounts of direct deposit to control how much money we get to spend.
Mac’s base pay – allotment / direct deposit = what we actually see in our bank account
It may sound excessive, but we have three main bank accounts. The first is a savings account with an allotment growing that money each month. We don’t save a ton these days, but it’s a good habit to be in. The second is our main checking account that our debit cards are linked to. This is our normal spending money, and we use it for bills that vary month-to-month (mainly utilities). The third is an online checking account. I set this up and rerouted part of direct deposit to it to handle all of our online bills. I love the convenience of automatic monthly payments for our mortgage, our car payments (hold me while I cry), and my student loans.
How many bank accounts do y’all use? Do you split things up like us?
Yes! This is what I do as well–we have three accounts I use for various bills/savings and then one main account. On paydays, I divy up the paycheck into the various accounts and what’s in the main account is what’s left for us to spend. It just makes much more sense to both of us that way and we know exactly how much is left after bills. 🙂
We have EIGHT bank accounts! Each one of our sinking funds (renter’s insurance, subscriptions, etc) each get their own accounts so the money doesn’t get mixed up!
We only have 2 accounts, our main checking and savings haha. Any more than that and I would go crazy.
We have several. One that Tom gets his Army retirement directed into, and that is deemed our house account. So the mortgage or anything we need to do to the house comes from that account. Then we have our main checking account that both of our paychecks funnel into which is our main spending and the rest of the bills. We then have 3 savings accounts for various things (vacation, general savings, kids fund). We have some auto payments and direct funneling into savings. We also get paid weekly so we have a target amount that we like to stay at in our checking and I check weekly for any extra that we can put away into savings.