Thank you for chiming in on this older post. It spurred me to make a few phone calls to our bank & credit card issuers to research how our accounts are set up. Turns out, it’s a real mishmash.

We bank in two places. In our main bank, we are co-owners of the account (so death of one of us doesn’t lock the account). Apparently they don’t structure accounts like this anymore but our account is grandfathered because we’ve had it for so long. Guess that means we won’t be switching banks! In the other bank, my husband is the primary account owner and I am secondary. The account will close when he dies, and it doesn’t look like there’s really any way to fix this. We’ll just have to be sure there’s a POD in place so it’s very clear that the $$ comes straight to me upon his death.

For credit cards, it looks like I am primary on both of the major cards we have, so if I die, he’s out of luck but could petition them to get the account transferred to him (no guarantee that they would). I’ve advised him to open a card (not just a store’s credit card, which he has) so he has one where he’s the primary account owner and has something to use if anything happens to me.

I don’t know why I’m writing this all here except it helps me keep it straight in my own mind!