Since I fly coast to coast 4 times a year for work, plus my husband and I fly at least twice a year for vacation, I opened up an American Airlines credit card.

We each put equal amounts into a joint checking and savings account each paycheck. From this account we pay our bills, groceries, household maintenance, etc. The rest of our money is ours to do with what we want. This setup can't change significantly due to different values about money.

That said, we'd like to put as much on it as possible but how we handle our finances makes that difficult. The only thing I can think of is going through the card activity list each month and creating a separate bill (my personal spending, his personal spending, joint spending) for each of us to pay toward it. Does someone have a similar setup with their spouse/partner and has found a way to easily maximize their rewards card benefits?

Thanks in advance!

No, just combine your finances and go for cash back over a rewards card.

Of course, its probably not that simple. My wife and I combine everything. Our income goes into a joint account and we pay for our expenses with joint credit cards.

On top of that we each take a small amount of personal spending money. Mine stays in the checking account because I run the books and can allocate as needed. My wife's monthly money goes into a separate account where she can do whatever she wants with it. She has her own credit card too so she can charge whatever she wants and use her cash to pay it off. That way we dont have to look at the bills every month and break out the personal expenses.

My wife and I have totally combined finances and share credit cards. Actually, we didn't have credit cards until the people on this forum recommended it to me so we can get a lower mortgage rate in a few years

We each have a set "allowance" for free personal spending. In actuality it all sits in the same account, and we just keep track of how much we have "saved up" for our personal spending over time.

With your situation it might be easiest to just have two separate credit cards. He could probably some extra bonus miles for signing up for his own card!

I am fairly sure you can have multiple credit cards pointing at the same American Airlines account. However, I assume there's an annual fee, so that's less than perfect.

Generally authorized user activity is lumped together with primary account holder information. I would ask the credit card issuer about it. Maybe they can track it separately for you.

Barring that, if you want to keep your setup, you need some way to track and divide up the expenses. I would use Quicken. I've never used it, but I used to use MS Money, and it worked like this: you can download the statement, then go through the expenses one at a time, assigning them to a Category or Label for each of you. Typically you can set it up so that certain merchants are automatically assigned to a particular label by default. That way if you tend to shop at the golf store and he at the book store, those will be assigned by default. If you go to the book store that might slip through the cracks; it depends on how strict you want to be about it. Also if there is a merchant (for instance, a grocery store or gas station) that you both use, that would be a pain point.

Why not just have him get his own card? Then you can get the bonus 30,000 miles or whatever for him too. I have always been able to get them to waive the annual fee.

That's how we do it. It takes me about 15 minutes a month to go through our 3 card statements and identify each charge as him, her, or split. Then everything is consolidated into a transfer from her to his checking or vice versa. It works for us. There is no joint account. We pay almost everything from the credit cards except a mortgage and that is done with automatic monthly transfers.

This works great for us and has for going on 20 years. We truly can't imagine how people combine finances! I know that works for many people though.

I think I say this every time this comes up in a thread, but I truly can't imagine how people (i.e. married couples) DON'T combine finances.

+1

You're married. Act like it.

We do not combine our finances either.

Do what works for you, if that's splitting finances that's fine, if it's joint finances that's fine to.

Marriage does not mean you need to share everything always. There's nothing wrong with having your own set of friends, your own hobbies, your own passions and dreams. So why would there be something wrong with having your own money? As long as there's enough overlap in your life it'll work out fine.

It really comes down to personal preference. In our case we are roughly equal in terms of earnings, spending, and attitude toward money. For us it is just the practical issue of trying to efficiently manage an account when you aren't sure what the other person is spending. I like to keep my checking balance as close to zero as possible. If my wife were writing checks against that account then it would risk being overdrawn. At least that's how it used to be. Now since we rarely write checks it would be less of an issue.

In the OP's case where they do don share the same spending habit or attitude, combining could lead to problems.

Exactly what does that mean? Do you share everything with your wife? Bras? Toothbrushes? Political attitudes on every issue?

I see nothing wrong with combining finances if that is what people want to do. I'm just saying that for us, we don't understand how it could function in practice. And quite frankly, if whether two people combine finances is what defines their marriage, well, I think they are already in trouble.

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I agree with both bpgui and Sonja. My wife and I combine finances and it's hard for me, personally, to imagine how it could work otherwise. But at the same time, I recognize that different strokes work for different folks, and certainly don't fault those couples who do keep separate finances, even if I can't figure out how they do so.

We keep our finances separate since my wife's family couldn't manage a wooden nickel must less any real money. I have no desire for my money to be lumped in with hers & then doled out to her brother every time he needs it because you "gotta help family".

Not. Gonna. Happen.

This debate comes up every now and then and is interesting to me, partly because SOME people seem to attach some profound meaning to how a couple manages their finances.

Tightwad gave you a good reason for why they keep things separate. In our case I think we do it for no particular reason. We live together for quite a while without being married so we were both "established" and that might have had something to do with it. We do talk about major purchases...and whenever I am about to do something stupid my wife talks sense into me...but we also spend our own money and divvy up the credit card and utility bills every month.

Why does it seem so offensive or dangerous to a marriage? I'm just curious why people might thing that.