A joint account is a big step on the journey from two separate lives to living as one. Getting one shows you are committed and trust each other. Practically speaking, it can simplify paying expenses and help you accumulate money for common goals. Plus, if one person passes away, an account set up with right of survivorship means the surviving partner can access the funds without going through probate. But giving up sole control of your finances can be tough to do. So before you move forward, you should have some serious discussions with your mate.

First, you should make sure you and your partner see eye-to-eye about your overall financial goals, says Karin Mizgala, a fee-only financial planner who sees couples in British Columbia. “Often the woman wants to get a plan in place for kids and a house, but the man hasn’t been terribly on top of his finances. She tries to initiate some conversations, and there’s resistance. Those are alarm bells that a lot of women just ignore.”

If you find you really don’t trust your partner, it may be a sign of a deeper problem. “You have to take a chance in any relationship,” says financial consultant and author Ruth Hayden, “but if you’re worried about protecting yourself from your partner, for goodness sake, don’t make a commitment yet. Something’s off.” If that’s the case, you may want to slow down, and address the underlying trust issues first.

If you decide to go forward, it’s fine to ease into it. Couples can start by using the joint account for smaller expenses, such as restaurant meals and groceries, then gradually expand its use to include all of the common expenses, including rent or mortgage payments.

The best strategy is for each person to keep their individual bank accounts in addition to one common joint account. Mizgala recommends that couples have their paycheques deposited into the joint account, and determine a fixed amount — say $500 a month — that will be automatically transferred into each partner’s personal account to spend as they like.

“That’s your money and your husband or wife can’t make any comments about what you spend it on,” Mizgala says. “If she wants to spend it on spas and magazines, he has no say. If he wants to buy a colour TV or something she may not approve of, she can’t say anything. There’s no guilt.”

In the end, Claire and Darrell Filafilo found that having a joint account worked out just fine. “I knew exactly when money was coming in, and I was able to have better control of everything through the central account,” says Claire. Today, 14 years after they got married, they still share the same account.

While these funds have since recovered a bit, many are still down over the past couple of years. The losses have surprised many investors who figured that a target-date fund was the ultimate in safe investments, especially if the target date was close at hand.

Dan Hallett, president of Dan Hallett & Associates, an investment research firm in Windsor, Ont., says it’s a natural misunderstanding. Many target-date funds become highly conservative as their target date comes near — but not all target-date funds do. In fact, two funds with the same target date can hold entirely different mixes of assets. A recent study by Watson Wyatt, a U.S. investment consulting firm, looked at a variety of shorter-term horizon target-date funds and discovered that the amount of their portfolios invested in the stock market ranged anywhere from a relatively conservative 32% to a very risky 80%.

Despite what many investors think, target-date funds aren’t guaranteed, except for a few that offer capital guarantees, which are expensive. “If you really want guarantees, just buy a guaranteed product,” Hallett says. “Whenever someone is taking risk out of your hands, you’re shifting that to someone else and you’re going to pay for it one way or another.”

Target-date funds are best for someone who wants to hand over all their investing decisions to someone else. “When you take a long-term view of someone investing and looking to progressively become a little more conservative when they approach retirement, then it is a fairly good product,” says Jean-Daniel, a principal at consulting firm Mercer in Montreal. But be sure to look at the asset mix of the fund and make sure that its definition of conservative matches your own.