Quote:
Originally Posted by The Big D  Not in any conventional sense. A bill has a connotation of being mandatory or close to it - if I don't pay the water bill, they shut off the water. Something like moving to a bigger house or taking a family vacation is a planned expense that's not mandatory, and therefore really isn't like a bill at all.
That's where the issue of money scarcity comes in - there are tons of things that are planned expenses that a given family or person would like, or desire, to pay for but that aren't required. These desires pretty much always exceed the available money [which is assumption 2)]. That's where tradeoffs come in. Separate accounting fails to deal with these tradeoffs, because it prevents the family from rationally trading off between personal desires and family desires since they are paid for out of separate accounts. |
So yours is an issue of semantics.
If it makes you feel better:
Bills are to be paid out of a joint account
Planned expenses are to be paid out of a joint account
Whatever is leftover is divided in two equal parts and put into separate accounts for spending money.