Managing Split Spending in MMEX with Joint Bank Account

[donnywagner]

Hi. My partner and I share a bank account for things like food, travel, etc. In MMEX, I want each expense from this account to count towards my spending statistics only 50%, since the rest is from my partner.

Also, sometimes I use my personal credit card to pay in advance, and then get 50% refunded from the joint account. I would like to clearly record these refunds as well.

I currently handle this by entering 50% of the amount, but is there a neater or more automatic way in MMEX? Thanks.

[Renato]

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[guangong]

This is an interesting scenario, and there was a very close one Managing expenses from a joint bank account

Maybe we can have a ratio per account in the future.

[luisdev]

Hi. My partner and I share a bank account for things like food, travel, etc. In MMEX, I want each expense from this account to count towards my spending statistics only 50%, since the rest is from my partner.

Also, sometimes I use my personal credit card to pay in advance, and then get 50% refunded from the joint account. I would like to clearly record these refunds as well.

I currently handle this by entering 50% of the amount, but is there a neater or more automatic way in MMEX? Thanks.

You could use the TAGS feature to record your transactions and your wife's transactions. Create a tag called "Wife" and another called "Husband". When you make a purchase on your credit card that you want to "share" with your wife, attach the "Husband" tag to the transaction. In the same way, attach the "Wife" tag to the "shared" transactions that she makes on her credit card. Then, at the end of the month, you can run a report for the Wife tag and a report for the Husband tag. That will show you what each of you spent. Then, whoever spent the least can refund the other partner the balance so that you reach a 50% share of the expenses.

When you make a purchase on your credit card you can't pretend that you only paid 50% of that expense. If it came off your credit card then you paid 100%. What your wife can do is refund you 50% of the expense later. But that's a lot of admin and unnecessary payments. It's easier to do the above, where you record each of your individual expenses - and attach the "Wife" or "Husband" tags to each of the transactions. Then you refund each other the difference at the end of the month in one transaction. Example: at the end of May there are transactions with the "Husband" tag totalling $1000 and transactions with the "Wife" tag totalling $500. Total = R1500. 50% of that $1500 is $750 so your wife pays you $250 to get to her 50% split in the monthly expenses ($750). That effectivewly brings your monthly exepnse to $750. Now both of you have spent $750.

Is that what you want?

If there are any expenses that you don't want to include in the "shared pool" then you don't attach any of the "Husband" and "Wife" tags to those transactions. That way they won't appear in the "Shared Expenses" report and you won't owe each other anything for those "non-shared" expenses. Example, if your wife wants to pay the full amount for her hairdresser appointments then you don't attach the "Wife" tag to those transactions in MMEX.
In the same way, if you're paying the full amounts for your barber transactions, then don't attach the "Husband" tag to those expenses. Those expenses will also be excluded from the "Shared Expenses" report.

[Nickallington]

I guess if this is really important there are ways to manage this in MMEX, but it requires you to set up parallel accounts. So if you have Food: Dining out in the default category tree, you can extend this to Food: Dining out: Self and Food: Dining out: Partner. When you enter a transaction you can use the Split function and allocate 50% to the Self category, and 50% to the Partner category (not too hard a calculation, but anyway you can use the MMEX amount calculation function if you want). Any subsequent entries to that same Payee will default to the split function you used, so you just need to enter the amounts in each row, and you only have to set up payments once. If Dining out was down to you only, just cancel the split and allocate 100% to Self.

If your primary hierarchy separation is you/Partner, then your category tree needs to start with that (e.g. Self: Food: Dining out, and Partner: Food: Dining out). That way you can separate all your expenses to one or the other, or summarise as both, without having to mess around with individual selections. The downside is you have a complete parallel category tree, one side for each of you.