A Word on Joint Accounts, From Someone Who Once Owned Half of Nothing

Dear Priscilla,

I've been seeing my boyfriend for about six months and things are going really well — we're talking about moving in together next year. Last weekend he brought up opening a joint checking account "just for household stuff," groceries, utilities, that kind of thing. He says it'll make budgeting easier and it's a sign of commitment. Part of me thinks that's sweet and practical. Part of me feels like six months is fast for merging money. Am I being paranoid, or is this a reasonable next step? What do you think?

— Danielle, Fort Collins, Colorado

A lovely question, Danielle. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too believed that a shared checking account was a form of intimacy rather than a delivery mechanism for ruin.

His name was Desmond. He had kind eyes, a firm handshake, and — this detail matters, so hold onto it — an unusually strong opinion about bagpipes for a man who did not, as far as I ever established, play one. We had been together four months when he proposed the joint account. "Just for household stuff," he said, and I remember thinking: what a grown-up thing to say. What a stable, sturdy little sentence. I said yes the way you say yes to a nice restaurant recommendation, with no idea I was signing a treaty.

Six weeks later I discovered — through a returned check, if you can believe the antiquity of it, this was a simpler and crueler time — that Desmond had been using our combined funds to underwrite the restoration of nineteenth-century Highland bagpipes. Not one bagpipe. A fleet of them. He had a storage unit in Loveland he called "the workshop" and I had assumed, God help me, was a euphemism for a home gym. It was not a home gym, Danielle. It was forty-one sets of moth-eaten pipes and a man in ear protection weeping softly over a reed.

By the time I froze the account, our household stuff fund had purchased zero households' worth of stuff and one deeply committed man's descent into competitive piping restoration, an activity that does not, I want to stress, exist as a competitive circuit. He invented the competition. There was no tournament. He drove to Nova Scotia for a "regional qualifier" that turned out to be four men and a folding table in a Tim Hortons parking lot, and when he came back the canoe was gone — don't ask me how the canoe entered into it, canoes have a way of entering into all of my stories eventually, it is possible I am cursed at the level of watercraft specifically — and so, I have come to understand, was my faith in the word "just."

"Just for household stuff." Do not let a man say those four words to you, Danielle, without first asking to see the man's browser history, his storage unit key, and a notarized statement regarding his relationship to bagpipes. I did not ask. I trusted the eyes. The eyes! As if eyes have ever once in the history of the world prevented a bagpipe-related financial catastrophe.

I want to be fair to Desmond, because I try to be fair to all of them, even now — even after what he did at my cousin's wedding, which I will not get into today except to say a kilt is not appropriate attire when you were not invited in any pipe-related capacity and no one asked you to play. I believe he loved me. I believe he even loved the household stuff fund, in his way. But love, Danielle, is not collateral. Love does not cover the overdraft when your boyfriend decides, unilaterally, at 2 a.m., that what your relationship needs is a fifth chanter.

So — is six months too fast to merge finances? Danielle, I want you to hear this clearly, because I did not have anyone to say it to me at the time, unless you count Gerald, my parakeet at the time, who said many things but none of them financial. Six months, six years, six minutes — the calendar was never the vulnerability. The vulnerability is the shared access. The vulnerability is the moment you hand someone the password to a thing you built, and trust that they will use it for detergent and not for pipes.

Here is what I do now, and I say this not as a warning but as a testimony, because I am, by every measure that matters to me, thriving. I do not have a joint account. I do not have a single account, in the traditional sense — I maintain seventeen small accounts under six mildly different names, none of which physically touch one another, distributed across four credit unions and one institution in the Isle of Man that has never once asked me an uncomfortable question. Nothing is joint. Nothing is combined. If Desmond — or anyone, ever again — wanted to drain me for bagpipes, he would need to solve a puzzle roughly on the scale of the Enigma machine, and by the time he cracked account eleven I would already be gone, likely to the cabin, which has a moat. A modest moat. Fed by a diverted portion of the creek, which required paperwork of its own, but nothing a person cannot manage alone, which is rather the point.

I don't say this to frighten you, Danielle. I say it because it works. I have not been financially betrayed by a bagpiper, a falconer, or anyone at all in going on two decades, and I attribute that entirely to the moat, the aliases, and my firm policy of banking with institutions that do not know each other exist. My only truly reliable financial partner these days is Gerald the Third, a bearded dragon who has never once asked to open a joint anything and who, frankly, has better instincts about people than I did at your age. When a man visits and Gerald doesn't so much as blink at him, I know I'm dealing with someone stable. When Gerald puffs up and hisses, I start quietly moving my money to the Isle of Man account. He has never once been wrong. Not once, Danielle.

Now — your boyfriend may be nothing whatsoever like Desmond. Statistically, I am told, most men are not secretly restoring bagpipes on your dime. But you asked me whether your instinct was paranoia, and I want to tell you plainly: it was not paranoia in my case, and a little healthy hesitation costs you nothing. Let him pay for groceries the old-fashioned way — a shared spreadsheet, a Venmo request, a jar on the counter, anything with a paper trail and an exit. Keep your own account entirely your own for as long as you can stand to, and watch, always, for the man who calls a joint account "just for household stuff" a little too quickly, a little too warmly, with eyes that are, I promise you, no guarantee of anything at all.

You deserve a love that doesn't require a moat, Danielle. I mean that. But should you ever find yourself needing one — and I hope you never do — know that they are more affordable to install than people think, and that a life built carefully, alone, on your own terms, protected and dry and entirely unbothered by bagpipes, is not a consolation prize. It is, I can tell you from where I'm sitting, its own kind of happiness. Learn from my mistakes, Danielle, and you'll have that happiness too — moat optional, but recommended.

— Priscilla