Hi y’all, I want to know how you navigate your way around shared accounts in different situations.
As I was trying to create a spotify playlist for you for next week’s Tech Tuesday post, I ran into some issues with being unable to access the family account. Grrr. Having been married almost a decade, it seems that we have several yours-mine-ours scenarios in which we duplicate accounts or must log in as each other. I wonder what other families do for books, movies, shopping, banking, etc.
Calendaring, we got handled. But everything else? Hmmm.
We have a shared email account that we use for school communication and most shopping sites. Between juggling our legacy (singleton) accounts and weird system mergers (like when Amazon ate Audible), things are rather murky in other areas:
- For our schedules, we each have google calendar and a shared family view. Each of the kids’ schools uses it too, so I have no complaints
- On iTunes, we are my husband. We both know his username and our super-secret password. Otherwise, we’d have to re-purchase every song, movie, and app. No thanks.
- On Amazon, I am prime, and the primary shopper. We are each ourselves for purchasing stuff; however on kindle and, now, audible, we are my husband. I do not know the log in info so I’m always asking him to do it; Kindle allows us to have various devices that he has to manage.
- On netflix, we used to be individuals until some weird “upgrade” made his account dominant. Luckily, I know the password.
- On Hulu-plus, we are him and I don’t know how to log in.
- On Paypal, we are HIM and other banking sites, we are each ourselves.
Basically, even though I learned how to program our family VCR in second grade, I can barely watch TV without my husband’s help.
There has to be a better way. Have you figured it out?
We are both me on Spotify. Pretty sure all of my friends think that I’m a major metal fan 🙂
@Natalie I often laugh at my hipster dude friends who appear to be listening to the Annie soundtrack. They’re not really weirdos, they just have 5-year old daughters.
We use a service called “LastPass” to manage our passwords. It’s primary purpose is to create uncrackable passwords and remember them for you, but it also allows us to share account and login information with each other. When we visit the relevant sites, a utility on our browser task bars asks us who we would like to log in as and then plugs the username and password in for us. (You have to log in to the service before this will happen though.) It doesn’t solve the too-many-accounts problem, but it does solve the I-can’t-watch-tv-without-my-husband’s-help problem.
Hubby’s in the Air Force so we’re me in almost everything since he isn’t always home…except Xbox live-then we’re him and I drag his stats waaaaay down 😉
I do have a input on the Amazon thing. The prime and the kindle person should be the same to get free kindle books and kindle freetime etc. We had similar setup as you, I had a kindle and Prime was in husband’s name. And I would get mad about not able to use the kindle prime library stuff. Talked to Amazon support but they couldnt help. So we waited until it was time for renewal and made my account Prime ( I already had bought kindle content and did not want to figure out what to do if we had to change the kindle to his name)
I love when the boys make me play weird al over and over and it shows up on Alec’s feed.
As for Amazon, I *think* we’re both prime because it knows we’re a couple but I could be mistaken. Lord knows I wouldn’t pay for it twice on purpose.
@Wendy, I’ll have to check that LastPass service out.
Shared:
Our mint.com login (for financial management – all bank/credit card/loan stuff is consolidated here)
Family tumblr
Family flickr
Individual:
Our bank logins (our bank allows multiple logins to same account)
Our individual credit cards
Amazon.com logins – though we share a prime membership as same household members
Instagram accounts (we link them both to the family tumblr/flickr for sharing kid photos)
Netflix/hulu/xbox live/tivo – my husband has those logins I guess though I can access them
PGE – husband
Water – me
Kindle & itunes – both, and this is stupid and we really should combine. (Although the itunes one is tricky because my husband is an app developer and has Strong Opinions about itunes stuff, so.)
I highly highly recommend a password vault like 1Password! You can have secure passwords for shared sites and not have to remember what it is, or have to risk the security problems of having just one password you use on all “shared” accounts (which is what we used to do and it made me nervous as hell).
@Jess, my husband also has some strong opinions in this area. I think mine about re-buying certain music, books, and movies is currently stronger.
With Amazon Prime, the main person on the account has access to books and Instant Videos. Everyone else just gets the two day shipping… unless there’s some trick I don’t know about!
What you are describing is a classic legacy system issue!
Since Jon travels, everything related to purchasing and/or entertainment is set up under my account. When I switched from Yahoo to Gmail, I merged everything to my Gmail account.
A great time to tackle this is when you move! We moved two years ago and I ripped off the band aid to move anything under him to me.
@Laura, So everything is set up under your name; does that mean that he frequently logs in as you?
I’m surprised this “marriage penalty” doesn’t have a cleaner solution.
We don’t do this, but one idea is to create a shared email account and use that for bills, entertainment, shopping, etc. Unfortunately, it could be a lot of work to set everything up and it might not be easy to change the email address/username on some of the existing accounts.
this is a great post . . . and an issue I am always so conflicted about. I have a junk email address I use for all of the shopping. The hubby doesn’t really do much online shopping. But we are separate for everything else and I am always trying to remember his passwords, etc.