#10, I realize it is now almost 4 years after you posted your story but i’d like to second the response from #14 that said RUN. …so, yeah, I hope you ran. …about 3 1/2 years ago.

All of you that said something along the lines of ‘where is the love’, ‘splitting money is not marriage’, ‘married means joint everything’, etc. are either not married or are lucky enough to have married someone that shares your philosophy on money and finance strategy. Please realize that not all of us are as lucky and stop gloating already.

Anyone whose spouse demands a 50/50 split (or heck ‘demands’ anything for that matter) without at least trying to be reasonable and discuss it should probably consider running like #10 should.

Those of you with the blended family question of ‘how much should I pay for my spouse’s kids’ needs?’ and ‘how much should I ask my spouse to pay for my kid’s needs?’ I say to lump it into the rest of the shared expenses, and if they have a spine they will happily agree. I’m sure they had an idea that the children were in the picture before you got married, right? they should have understood that it is a package deal.

#66: I can follow your logic to a point, but that only works in situations where spouse B intentionally stopped advancing their education and/or career and when spouse B is content with their income. I suppose then that spouse B would probably not care if spouse A spent/invested money that A had earned, so the point would be moot anyway. the problem with that and the idea that it is ‘unfair’ to spouse A is that rarely does spouse B willingly stop advancing their career. a spouse cutting back hours or giving up work entirely to take care of children is not really the same as saying “nah, 60k is plenty for me”. In the case of the rare event that it was willing, i’m saying that spouse A probably knew what he/she was getting into when they got married, and shouldn’t look at it as being ‘penalized’.

My situation is like many listed here, somewhat difficult and not really a candidate for most of the budgeting methods that have been discussed here. All kinds of ideas sound great and should work on paper, but the human element gets involved and everything then gets all muffed up. I am now thinking of different ways to get my spouse to remember what being responsible with money means. I would like to continue to have one account and to be honest I never really consider doing it any other way until recently, when my spouse’s spending starting getting ridiculous, but i’m starting to think that is a pipe dream. I am going to discuss the percent idea soon and see what the spouse thinks, I guess, but who knows if that’ll work. the problem at my house is communication. I may as well tell the dog that we need to talk about major purchases PRIOR to making them and that we should address bills together weekly, for all the good it has done me to try to get my spouse to communicate with me.
my latest ideas are:

1- Keep the joint account and practice financial unity, with the exception of one low-limit credit card that the other cannot view statements for for each of us, for gifts for each other and such
2- Three accounts, one each and one joint. split the bills by the percentage method which are paid from each personal acct, and put a decided upon amount(this could be a fixed number for both or a percentage– i’m not really sure yet) in the joint each month for ‘together’ expenses.
3- Three accounts as before, only with this idea we split the bills to a point that we have the same amount remaining, which equals the same number contributed to the joint expenses and the same amount to pay for our individual mad money accts.

I’m currently leaning toward number three. it is less fair for the bigger earner, but i’m thinkin it will be better for the overall happily ever after part.

Feel free to tell me what any of y’all think, even if it is that I am a dummy.

Has anyone heard of any class action lawsuits in the works that would influence Intuit either to fix the bugs, refund our money, or allow 2010 to continue downloading after the deadline?

If I knew how to proceed, I would start one myself!

I am absolutely a hand-entry kind of guy. Until it becomes absolutely too much work/time, I’ll continue to enter all my own stuff by hand. (It takes mere seconds for me to enter a receipt or invoice into QB, so it’s not like each one’s a huge time sink.)

I can’t give you an opinion on the services, as I’ve never so much as researched any of them, much less used them.

Etsy deposits all my invoices paid on Mondays, then I subtract the fees and write a EFT check showing as paid. For simplicity, would you recommend the same with pay-pal. Enter my weekly deposits seperately, for pay-pal I would pull the fee from each receipt.

If my business grows to 200 orders a month next year, will it be too much to hand enter receipts or just the cost of doing business?

This has worked well for us because we don’t have a lot of unequal debt. Also, we have mutual love, respect and trust for the other and know that we would not hurt each other financially.