If you handle the money
The bank goes by whose name is on the account
In most couples one person handles the money. They know which account the mortgage goes out of, which card the insurance sits on, and which checking account must never run dry.
This is a United States system, so what follows applies to American accounts.
Nobody plans it. One of you is better at it, or has more time, and after fifteen years only one of you knows.
Being married doesn’t put your name on the account
A bank looks at the account, not at the marriage. If the account is in one name, that person is the one who can use it. If both names are on it, either of you can.
Who owns what between a married couple is a question for an attorney where you live, and the answer varies by state. Whether your wife can pay the electricity bill on Tuesday is a different question, and the bank settles that one by looking at the name on the account.
A couple can be married forty years and one of them still can’t move a dollar out of the account the salary lands in.
The payments keep going out
Most households run on payments nobody touches. The mortgage, the insurance, the utilities, the subscription somebody set up in 2019.
Those carry on whether or not the person who set them up is around. For the first month that’s a mercy. After that, money is leaving an account nobody is watching, for things that may no longer be needed.
Stopping one takes a few days. You tell the bank at least three business days before the payment is due, by phone or in writing, and they can ask you to put it in writing within two weeks.
But only if your name is on the account. Without that, you can’t stop a payment and you can’t start one.
Nobody can hand you the list
There’s no register of somebody’s accounts to ask for. A bank knows the accounts you are on. It can’t tell you about the ones you are not on, and it has no idea which other banks they use.
So families find out slowly: the mail, the tax return, the card statements, and a year of small surprises.
Or quickly, from a list somebody wrote out on an ordinary evening.
What the other one would need
Not the balances. Those change.
Which bank, and roughly what each account is for. Which card the regular payments come off. Which policies there are, and who each one is with. Where the mortgage is and when it’s paid off. The accountant’s name, if there’s one.
That fits on two sides of paper. It takes an evening, and the person who writes it is nearly always the one who will never need to read it.
- A binder doesn’t go wrong all at once
- There is money sitting with the state, waiting for somebody to ask for it
Sources
- Deposit insurance ownership categories, single and joint accounts, FDIC
- 12 CFR 1005.10(c), Regulation E, stopping a preauthorized transfer
The binder has a section for the accounts, the policies and who to ask. You can read a finished one before you spend anything: the example binder.