A joint account is useful for sharing everyday financial matters but a poor place to save for a rainy day. 

It is a good idea to direct your funds to your account. If necessary, you can give your partner access rights to your account so she can pay bills and transfer funds from your account. The partner’s access right to your account ends immediately upon your death, however. After that, they can no longer withdraw funds or make transfers from your account.

If e-invoices or direct debits are automatically transferred from the account, their charging is considered by the bank on a case-by-case basis upon the death of the account owner. In general, there is no obstacle for continuing to pay rent, electricity bills and insurance premiums, but newspaper bills may no longer be paid, for example.

Scale a joint account to your everyday expenses

If you have a joint account with your partner, both of you generally have access rights to it. Both you and your partner can use the account independently. This type of account is called an OR account. You will keep your access right to the OR account in the event of the death of your partner. The death estate becomes the second owner of the account.

However, either of you, or the account owner, has the right to demand the freezing of the funds on the account, as does the death estate or its individual distributees if the death estate has become the second owner. In addition, when both owners are alive, both of them have to right to demand the freezing of the joint account. No one may access the funds of a frozen account.

The account access rights can also be defined so that you may only use the account together. This type of account is called an AND account. In practice, your partner and you must visit the branch to pay with or withdraw funds from the account in question. Therefore, an AND account may not be used without a distributee of a death estate after the death of your partner. 

In both cases, the death estate becomes the other owner of the joint account as a result. For this reason, it is a good idea to save for a rainy day – funds that you need for sudden and unexpected expenses – in your own account. The funds in a joint Savings Account may often only be accessed after the estate inventory has been prepared.

It should also be understood that the funds of a joint account are always viewed as being half-owned – regardless of how much more money an owner has transferred to the account.

Tiina Kallinen, Sales Director at OP Uusimaa, has been interviewed for this article.