The division of labor in a marriage often results in one person handling the banking, subscriptions, passwords and more. That can leave the other person in the dark about how to locate and access the family’s accounts.
Payal Adhikari, a Chicago pediatrician, came to this realization recently.
When she got married in 2014, she had debt from medical school. Her husband, Shashank Sane, offered to handle their living expenses while she focused on paying off her student loans. As the years went by and they bought a house and had two children, they stayed in their lanes, with her managing the kids’ lives and household needs and Sane managing the bills.
Late last year, she was reading a book called “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” about a woman disentangling the family finances after her husband of 20 years abruptly leaves her. While Adhikari had no concerns about her husband running off, the book did get her thinking about how little she knew of their monetary logistics. If something happened to Sane, she wouldn’t know where to begin handling the digital subscriptions, bills and investments.
“I was overwhelmed by the number of things I didn’t know,” she says.
Adhikari told her husband she wanted to get up to speed. She jotted down questions: What accounts were the streaming services and athletic club membership paid out of? Who held their life and disability insurance policies? To whom did they make car payments? Where were all their passwords?
Sane, an energy company executive, says he was happy to oblige. He had seen the trouble his mother had gone through to access accounts after his father died a few years prior. (My colleague Veronica Dagher recently wrote about a woman who spent a year untangling her family finances following the death of her husband.)
“The concept of dividing the responsibilities of the house and family makes sense, but knowing what’s happening is important,” he says.
Spreadsheets and coffee
With her list of unknowns complete, Adhikari and her husband each brought their laptops to a coffee shop in January. They spent an hour creating a shared master document in a Google drive, listing all of their accounts.
There were things Adhikari added that Sane didn’t have, including access to the bank accounts she had set up for their kids, her disability insurance information and a health savings account from a prior employer. They double-checked that both of their names were on all accounts.
They also printed out a list of account passwords, which they keep in a safe. They also store them digitally in a password manager both can access. (Our personal tech columnist Nicole Nguyen recommends 1Password and Dashlane).
The exercise was empowering, Adhikari says. “I always tell my kids not to put things off, to do things now, and yet here I was with these things lingering in my brain,” she says. “You just have to rip the Band-Aid off.”
Sane says the date was helpful for him, too, because it motivated him to consolidate all of their account information into a living document that can be updated as needed.
How to do it
Douglas Boneparth, a certified financial planner, had managed his family’s finances until a few years ago, when his wife, Heather, decided she wanted more visibility.
“When you intentionally or unintentionally step away from household finances, you don’t realize right away that you’re losing agency and options, but over time you start to feel it,” Heather says.
The two have since co-written a book, “Money Together,” and give talks on how couples should have equal involvement in the family finances.
“There’s a low-threat way to open these conversations. You can say, ‘If something happened to you, I’m concerned I wouldn’t know where everything is,” says Heather, a former corporate attorney who now manages their financial planning business. “If your partner doesn’t want you to be involved or tries to block access, that’s a red flag.”
The Boneparths offered some tips on how both partners can get up to speed:
Do it now. Don’t wait until an emergency to figure out how to access accounts.
Ensure authorization. Even when you have joint accounts, a bank might consider one person the primary account holder. Make sure you’re both authorized to talk to the bank and conduct transactions.
Do a trial run. Whatever your partner would normally do in a given month—flagging fraudulent charges, transferring money, checking investments—you try to do instead (and vice versa). Make sure you get the hang of handling the things your partner usually does, and that institutions recognize your ability to do so.
Write a note. Douglas composed what he calls a one-page, annually updated “death note” for Heather, detailing who to call and what to do if something were to happen to him. It includes the password to his computer. Heather made one for him, too. They keep the notes in their safe.
Make it a regular date. Douglas recommends couples meet quarterly to go over any account changes and to update passwords and documents. (Many multigenerational families do this.) If things are pretty stable, you might prefer doing it just once a year.
Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com