Why did you open a bank account?

[Gro 8]

To those of you who came to the US on a K-1 visa and opened a new bank account in your own name, why did you? Isn't it enough to just join your US spouse's bank account?

I see quite a few people in here talk about the importance of getting a SSN quickly so you can OPEN a bank account and I'm wondering if this is something I should do as well. I'm on my husband's bank account now, in case that changes anything.

[Lemonslice 4,858]

We keep most of our finances separate, using the joint account only to pay some shared bills or transfer money to each other. We're both a bit OCD about managing our money, that works for us.

[Penguin_ie 5,994]

We have a joint account only, but even with that, they wanted to see my SSN within 30 days of opening the account. I doubt they would have closed it again on us if I hadn't been able to show them, but who knows!

[Merrytooth 5,748]

I prefer to have my personal account as well.

[Georgia16 2,858]

I think it's just a personal thing how people choose to do it.

Some are fine with joint accounts only, other want their own and some do both.

We only have joint accounts and credit cards and that works perfectly fine for us. I provided my ssn number when I got added to his in the bank.

[Gro 8]

Thanks for all replies, that makes it perfectly easy to understand then.

[mcrt 1]

I plan on getting my wife a new account soon. I want her to be able to earn interest on her money and start building a credit rating of her own. We'll get her a credit card too from the credit union. I plan to stay married for a long time and keep living, but you never know what will happen. My brother died at 21 shortly after he was married. Better to have her able to make it on her own ASAP.

[Ash.1101 1,756]

We wanted to go for the SSN pretty fast so we could add him to my account and make it a joint account, mainly because we knew we'd be getting wedding money, sending over money, depositing cash he brought, etc.

Right now we don't really see the need to have separate accounts as we treat our money as our money and generally we talk about any kind of big purchases and stuff and do it together, so the rush wasn't for a separate personal account, but just to add to the joint account.

[TabeaK 517]

On 12/19/2016 at 1:52 AM, Gro said:

To those of you who came to the US on a K-1 visa and opened a new bank account in your own name, why did you? Isn't it enough to just join your US spouse's bank account?

I see quite a few people in here talk about the importance of getting a SSN quickly so you can OPEN a bank account and I'm wondering if this is something I should do as well. I'm on my husband's bank account now, in case that changes anything.

Because I earn my own money and need a place to manage it. Joint account = shared expenses, personal account = individual expenses.