MINI: Joint Bank Accounts with Friends... genius or disaster waiting to happen?

There is a friendship group on TikTok that has a joint bank account to pay for their yearly Girls Trips. Britt & Laura unpack the concept and decide whether is genuis or just a friendship break up waiting to happen. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
High Heart podcasts, hear more Kiss podcast playlist, and listen
live on the free iHeart app. Now, we all know
when it comes to like money in relationships, it can
be kind of a tricky.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thing, right, root of all evil.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Well, apparently number one cause will break up in romantic
relationships is cheating, and number two is finances, which you
know a lot of people don't see arder I unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Checks out though.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
But also I think it's pretty common for people in
romantic relationships to have joint bank accounts. You know, you
share whatever's coming out of your rent, your common food items.
Like everyone splits money quite differently, though the money I.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Mean, like I don't know how far we're going into this.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
Money is a problem in family dynamics, relationships, friend relationships,
like not just romantic relationships. I know families that have
had proper fallouts over money, Yeah, of course, but cocurtenances
and whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
I mean, we can talk about the negatives, how don't
we talk about the positives of these things? So for
some people who have joint bank accounts with their partners, also,
it's like a really great savings tool in order to
kind of like plan things that are coming up together,
like maybe you're co saving for a holiday or you've
got like, you know, a little pot of money that
you're doing something to have something special off the back
of it for each other, got it right?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:22):
So saving There is a group of six women who
have kind of decided to do it a little bit differently.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
They have created a friendship group joint bank account. The
reason for this is that every week they put twenty
dollars in each and every year, once a year they
go away on a big friendship holiday and they have
already pretty much prepaid for the majority of it. They
will use that account to either pay for drinks or
cover the hotels, cover the food. And there's one person

(01:48):
in that friendship group who is responsible for all of
the I guess like.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
The admin of the bank account. So it's like about
one thousand dollars each a. Yeah, when did you do
that mass pact? I just do it then? Yeah, it's
just over one thousand.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Dollars each year, but it means that they've got over
six thousand each year in that bank account and they
can go and have a little holiday together.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Did you do this with your friends? I mean, I
think it has its pros and cons.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
It's like, yes, it's for savings, because you're actually twenty
dollars a week. The fact that my friends are doing it,
it's making me want to do it at the end
of the day. Could they just be putting that twenty
dollars away into their own account and maybe earn an
interest on it. Yes, but you are very trusting on
I guess if there's one person that controls the whole account.
I'm assuming when you're that good of friends, if you're
that good of friends that you go away together a year,

(02:34):
that you're trusting of that person. Yeah, one thousand dollars
at the end of the year is still a lot
of money for someone else to hold on to.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
True, I do agree, But also what I love about
this is like the forward commitment to going on a
girl's trip. Like I love that by doing this, you're
saying a year out, Okay, we've all made this commitment.
We're all going to like work together to have the
time away as friends.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
I'd love to know if there's rules, So like if
you get ten months in and all of a sudden
you have come across a financial burden or something you
need access to that money Are you allowed to withdraw
it or is it like maybe fund only surely, but
surely if.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
You do withdraw it, then you're not going on holiday,
right like? Or do you pay your way afterwards. The
reason why they came up with this is because they
had been on group holidays before and they'd run into dramas.
Everyone knows what it's like when you go out for
dinner and like, the bill doesn't get split evenly or
even worse, it gets split completely evenly, and you've got
one person who wasn't drinking and someone who was having

(03:28):
like six margaritas.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
I know what you're saying, Laura, but I think that
that doesn't work in this situation because if someone has
got a bank card with all the money in it,
you've gone out to dinner, one person's ordered the lobster
and the chardonnay, and then someone's had water in a salad.
Are you just paying for that out of the joint
bank account. No, that's not even.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
So they have rules around it. So they had one
friend who was pregnant one year couldn't drink any alcohol,
so they decided that all the alcohol was paid individually
by the people like who were there and everything else
that was like shared communal holiday stuff was split. I
think it's got legs. I actually think this is great.
To be honest, I think that probably your girlfriends are
going to be less likely to financially abuse you than

(04:04):
relationships at some point.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
I'm sorry, I'm getting to munted this.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
I've got a lot of questions.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
If there's like an overflow to the money, I don't
have all the answers for it. I am not the
six women. Well, I've really invested now. I wonder how
it works, but I don't think it's the worst thing.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
I think if it's gonna like lock you into making
sure you have some time with your friends and some
quality time away, then yeah, maybe everyone should be doing
a dream bank.

Speaker 2 (04:24):
Account with your friends. But I don't know where he
is going.

Speaker 3 (04:26):
I don't know if you're about to ask for access
to my bank account.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
No, no, I don't want access to your bankcount.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
But I think that.

Speaker 1 (04:32):
This is the solution for getting the girls trip out
of the WhatsApp group because everyone talks about it. Everyone
says we should go away on a holiday and.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Then nothing ever happens.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
But if you have a joint bank account, you're putting
away twenty bucks a week. It means that, like you
get to the point where you're like, Okay, well look
at this.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
We've got the savings, we've got to meet the effort.
We're going to go.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I love that I had to get married to go
on a girls trip with you. Right.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Well, that's it from us today, guys,