[em-bee]

To me, having separate individual accounts, feels like you aren't committing fully to marriage and are keeping your money yours "just in case."

in china, the account that receives your salary must be at the same bank that the employer uses because payroll is usually done with a system provided by the banks (at least that was the case in my company) so a joint account would not have been possible.

we also had bank accounts by function. we created a separate bank account for our insurance where they could automatically withdraw the payments. i don't remember if there was a specific reason for that though.

and i created a separate account for online purchases that i deliberately kept at a low balance to reduce the risk of fraud when sharing banking information online.

and my wife has accumulated a few more bank accounts over time, i guess in part because of different employers, or i have no idea. i learned the pin for most of them.

so i don't think it matters. what matters is how you view the ownership of the money in the accounts. in our case we simply added up our combined account balances as the money we had available. and money was spent from any account as was convenient except the accounts for a specific purpose. we never argued over whose money it was, but only sometimes over the necessity of an expense.