My wife and I are both pretty involved in our finances. I love numbers, and anything to do with money, and she enjoys knowing what is going on.
For the past few years (since we got married), we have been working on getting things set up so we can see where our money is spent, properly allocate our incoming funds to various categories, and set up budgets to try to follow.
At this point, we do some sort of mix of the following:
1) Mint - tracks all of our purchases
2) Excel spreadsheet - I pull numbers from mint so I can manipulate it a little better
3) Asset allocation - we have a "formula" that the SO uses to divvy up paycheques into separate accounts (down payment, home, travel, etc.)
It's gotten to the point where it is frustrating and difficult to keep up with everything, and keep the information the same from place to place.
A few more things about our set up:
1) Our accounts (wherever possible) are joint.
2) We like to have separate accounts for a few different things as keeping the money in our main chequing account wouldn't work, and it is annoying to figure out how much we have saved for particular things if it is all lumped together in one savings account. Examples of accounts we have are:
- down payment
- new car
- travel
- tangerine funds for retirement (his and her)
- retirement fund through my work
- pension through hers
3) My income is constant, hers is not. She is currently paid over 10 months, and we don't know whether she will get full-time, full-year work until right before the school year starts.
4) We started this year having "fun money" for each of us, but I find this hard to track, because I still want to know where the money is spent.. so it's hard not to have it show up twice in places
5) We try to also allocate funds for irregular purchases for things such as gifts, car maintenance, etc.
Sorry for the long-winded post. If I were to pair it down to a few questions, they would be:
1) Given our situation, does anyone have a similar setup that you think might work for us?
2) I'm sure we are making things way too complicated on ourselves. How can we simplify while having lots of information at our fingertips?
3) How do you folks set aside money for a) big future purchases and b) irregular purchases?
Thanks in advance!