If you are sharing expenses with a significant other or roommate and paying for things out of separate bank accounts, we bet you’d like a simple way to keep track of everything. That’s how we felt when we first created our spreadsheet back in 2012 and it’s been keeping us resentment free ever since!
We mentioned this tracker in Episode 2 – Brass Tacks: How We Manage Our Money.
Access it here instantly: Money Date Night Monthly Shared Expenses Tracker
Here’s the background to our expense sharing system:
We split our shared expenses 50/50 and the top reasons this works in our situation:
1. We earn approximately the same amount of income and we routinely spend less than we make. This means we know we can each cover our expenses.
2. We know what accounts as a “shared expense” with discretionary spending and its anything that benefits us both. For example, if Lindsey picks up landscaping supplies, that’s a shared expense. If she decides to buy herself flowers, that’s not a shared expense. 🙂Â
3. We like having our own accounts and not having to ask each other to spend money. We haven’t had a need for a joint account for expenses.
4. By “owing” each other at the end of each month, it holds us accountable to look at our finances monthly. This may be the most important piece to our system. The two things we check for are: 1) inflated spending in any of the categories and 2) who is doing more of the shopping. The reason why we care about the shopping is because we both don’t particularly enjoy grocery shopping and if we see one of us is doing a lot of the grocery runs for a couple months in a row, the other person jumps in the next month. We really try our best to share household work roles as equally as possible because we want to stay married!Â
Looking for other ideas for helpful money tools and apps? We reviewed our favorites and shared them in this 10 minute podcast bonus: Lindsey + Colin’s Money Tool Review 2019. Listen to it!
