Shared email address between husband and wife to get bills

Question

I would like to have shared email address that my wife and I can access. The following is our use case.

We pay our house hold bills for several utilities; like broad band internet, electricity and gas. Up till now we got our bill over snail mail and hence either one of us could go over those bills and take care of paying them. When the bills would get paid we would mark on it by pencil that it was paid for the others benefit.

But recently we moved to paperless email bills. The broad band internet company, the electricity company and the gas mentioned that they cannot accept multiple email address and hence we signed up using just my gmail address. This results that she does not get the bills and hence is not able to process and pay them.

I though about creating gmail-filters so I could send a copy of those bills to my wife too. But that leaves us we two copies of the same email. There is no way for us to mark (in pencil) that it has been paid like we did with the paper bill.

I bet other have faced this issue. What can be possible solutions?

Answer 1

You mention:

"I would like to have shared email address that my wife and I can access."

And further down:

"I though about creating gmail-filters so I could send a copy of those bills to my wife too"

A bit confusing. Do you want a single shared email address OR two separate ones?

In any case I think your best bet is to use a single shared address.

Under the shared address (either yours or your wife's)

• Create two (2) labels. One called Pending and another one called Paid.
• Mark all incoming (unpaid) bills with Pending.
• Whoever accesses the email first and pays the bill (either your wife or you) should change the label from Pending to Paid.

Pro tip:
You could change the email address in those organizations to [email protected] and create a filter so the label Pending is automatically applied to them upon arrival. Gmail disregards any characters after the + sign.
You can then follow the previous steps.

Answer 2

In fact, the electricity bills I got the last time were the last straw. It's too expensive. I decided that now is the time to switch to solar energy, so I bought solar panels and mppt charge controller firstly to regulate the operation of the panels, extending their lifespan. I hope that after a couple of months I can create a good solar station at home and not worry about the bills.