Joint account that requires all signatures of all owners to withdraw money?
Savings accounts have lower fees. If you don't anticipate doing many transactions per month, e.g. three or fewer withdrawals, then I would suggest a savings account rather than a checking account. A joint account that requires both account holder signatures to make withdrawals will probably require both account holders' signature endorsements, in order to make deposits. For example, if you are issued a tax refund by the U.S. Treasury, or any check that is payable to both parties, you will only be able to deposit that check in a joint account that has both persons as signatories. There can be complications due to multi-party account ownership if cashing versus depositing a joint check and account tax ID number. When you open the account, you will need to specify what your wishes are, regarding whether both parties or either party can make deposits and withdrawals. Also, at least one party will need to be present, with appropriate identification (probably tax ID or Social Security number), when opening the account.  If the account has three or more owners, you might be required to open a business or commercial account, rather than a consumer account. This would be due to the extra expense of administering an account with more than two signatories. After the questioner specified interest North Carolina in the comments, I found that the North Carolina general banking statutes have specific rules for joint accounts: Any two or more persons may establish a deposit account...   The deposit account and any balance shall be as joint tenants...   Unless the persons establishing the account have agreed with the bank   that withdrawals require more than one signature, payment by the bank   to, or on the order of (either person on) the account satisfys the bank's obligation I looked for different banks in North Carolina. I found joint account terms similar to this in PDF file format, everywhere, Joint Account: If an item is drawn so that it is unclear whether one payee’s   endorsement or two is required, only one endorsement will be    required and the Bank shall not be liable for any loss incurred by the   maker as a result of there being only one endorsement. also  Joint accounts are owned by you individually or jointly with others.   All of the funds in a joint account may be used to repay the debts of   any co-owner, whether they are owed individually, by a co-owner,   jointly with other co-owners, or jointly with other persons or   entities having no interest in your account. You will need to tell the bank specifically what permissions you want for your joint account, as it is between you and your bank, in North Carolina.
Bank of America is the worst. Once I had a joint account with another individual that I had funded out of my account to make payroll.   When I found out that he had screwed two other people by stealing the payroll money I decided to disburse it myself and transferred it back to my corporate account on which I was the only signer.  He went back to the bank and effected a withdrawal from my account to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, put the money in the joint account and removed me as a signer.   The bank wouldn't give me my money back and I never collected from him.  Another time I tried to close my sons' accounts which were in inactive status.  Every day for a week they told me they could not close the account until it was active, but they were working on making it active.  Chase could do this in a minute.  I finally went to a branch and loudly informed the manager that maybe the bank was insolvent and that I should call the FDIC to see why they won't release my money.  He wanted to take me into his office.  I told him loudly, I know all about DDAs, Savings and CDs, I have run deposit operations for a major bank and wrote software to process them.  Just put a hold on the account, write me two cashiers check and offset them with a suspense voucher.  You do know how to write a suspense voucher don't you? It's just a general ledger entry to a suspense account.  Well he was so embarassed he would do anything to get me out of the branch and gave me the cashier's checks.  Fuck B of A. You might want to head on over to https://law.stackexchange.com/ and ask the same question.   However from a personal finance perspective this kind of drama is somewhat common when someone is deceased and financial expectations are not met by the heirs.  It sounds like the daughter was expecting a lot more in inheritance than was actually received.  There was probably an overestimation of dad's net worth and an underestimation of the cost of his care toward the end of his life. Its best not to participate in this drama, and I feel that you are correct that the daughter does not have a right to see the bank account statements prior to dad's passage.  The question is also if she has a right to see it now. Here in the US a joint account can be setup so the ownership transfers to other account holder(s) up death of an owner.  So in this case your mother would own the account.  If the account is setup as such, then the estate has no right to that money.  You may want to check with the bank for some free advice.  What is the classification of the account now that dad has passed?  When a person grants someone else the power of attorney they have the ability to act as if they were that person.  Most of the time POAs are limited in scope so If I give a person the POA to register a car in my name, they cannot apply for a credit card in my name (legally).  In this case, however, the POA was probably general so pretty much your mom could do whatever she pleased. So if your mom took good care of the dad and bought herself some nice jewelry that is perfectly allowable with a general POA. I strongly doubt this daughter has any rights to the past records and may not even have the rights to the joint bank account currently. The ownership of the house depends on what the original deed transferring title at the time of purchase says and how this ownership is listed in government records where the title transfer deed is registered. Hopefully the  two records are consistent.  In legal systems that descended from British common law (including the US), the two most common forms of ownership are tenancy in common meaning that, unless otherwise specified in the title deed, each of the owners has an equal share in the entire property, and can sell or bequeath his/her share without requiring the approval  of the others, and joint tenancy with right of survivorship meaning  that all owners have equal share, and if one owner  dies, the survivors form a new JTWROS. Spouses generally own property,  especially the home, in a special kind of JTWROS called tenancy by the entirety. On the other hand, the rule is that unless explicitly specified otherwise, tenancy in common with equal shares is how the owners hold the property. Other countries may have different default assumptions, and/or have multiple other forms of ownership (see e.g. here for the intricate rules applicable in India). Mortgages are a different issue. Most mortgages state that the mortgagees are jointly and severally liable for the mortgage  payments meaning that the mortgage holder does not care who makes the payment but only that the mortgage payment is made in full. If one owner refuses to pay his share, the others cannot send in their shares of the mortgage payment due and tell the bank to sue the recalcitrant co-owner for his share of the payment: everybody is liable (and can be sued) for the unpaid amount, and if the bank forecloses, everybody's share in the property is seized, not just the share owned by the recalcitrant person.  It is, of course, possible to for different co-owners to have separate mortgages for their individual shares, but the legalities (including questions such as whose lien is primary and whose secondary) are complicated. With regard to who paid what over the years of ownership, it does not matter as far as the ownership is concerned. If it is a tenancy in common with equal shares, the fact that the various owners paid the bills (mortgage payments, property taxes, repairs and maintenance) in unequal amounts does not  change the ownership of the property unless a new deed is recorded with the new percentages.  Now, the co-owners may decide among themselves as a matter of fairness that any money realized from a sale of the property should be divided up in accordance with the proportion that each contributed during the ownership, but that is a different issue. If I were a buyer of property titled as tenancy in common, I (or the bank who is lending me money to make the purchase) would issue separate checks to each co-seller in proportion to the percentages listed on the deed of ownership, and let them worry about whether they should transfer money among themselves to make it equitable. (Careful here! Gift taxes might  well be due if large sums of money change hands). "This will happen automatically when you open an interest-bearing account with a bank.   You didn't think that banks just kept all that cash in a vault somewhere, did you?  That's not the way modern banking works.   Today (and for a long, long time) banks will keep only a small fraction of their deposits on hand (called the ""reserve"") to fund daily withdrawals and other operations.  The rest they routinely lend out to other customers, which is how they pay for their operations (someone has to pay all those tellers, branch managers, loan officers) and pay interest on your deposits, as well as a profit for their owners (it's not a charity service).  The fees charged for loan origination, as well as the difference between the loan interest rate and the deposit rate, make up the profit.   Banks rarely hold their own loans.  Instead, they will sell the loans in portfolios to investors, sometimes retaining servicing rights (they continue to collect the payments and pass them on) and sometimes not (the payments are now due to someone else).  This allows them to make more loans.   Banks may sometimes not have enough capital on hand.  In this case, they can make inter-bank loans to meet their short-term needs.  In some cases, they'll take those loans from a government central bank.  In the US, this is ""The Fed"", or the Federal Reserve Bank.   In the US, back around the late 1920's, and again in the 1980's some banks experienced a ""run"", or a situation where people lost confidence in the bank and wanted to withdraw their money.  This caused the bank to have insufficient funds to support the withdrawals, so not everyone got their money.  People panicked, and others wanted to take their money out, which caused the situation to snowball.  This is how many banks failed.  (In the '80s, it was savings-and-loans that failed - still a kind of ""bank"".)  Today, we have the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) to protect depositors.  In the crashes in the early 2000's, many banks closed up one night and opened the next in a conservatorship, and then were literally doing business as a new bank without depositors (necessarily) even knowing.  This protected the consumers.  The bank (as a company) and its owners were not protected." Online banks are the future. As long as you don't need a clerk to talk to (and why would you need?) there's nothing you can't do with an online bank that you can with a brick and mortar robbers. I use E*Trade trading account as a checking account (it allows writing paper checks, debit card transactions, ACH in/out, free ATM, etc). If you don't need paper checks that often you can use ING or something similar. You can always go to a local credit union, but those will wave the fee in exchange for direct deposit or high balance, and that you can also get from the large banks as well, so no much difference there. Oh where where did Washington Mutual go.... "Yes you should worry and take care not to violate the law or provide any appearance of impropriety.   Every bank in the USA is required under the Bank Secrecy Act to report cash transactions over $10,000 the same day to the IRS -- and here's the fun secret part -- without notification to the depositor.   But splitting the deposits up into smaller amounts is also a crime, called ""structuring"".   On occasion there is a news story where a retail business that naturally must deposit cash from customers will be (falsely?) accused of structuring, e.g.:  Feds seize grocery store's entire bank account -- Institute for Justice defends grocer Under the legal doctrine of civil asset forfeiture, your money can be accused of a crime, seized, and tried separately from its owner.  The actual cases indicate the money as defendant, i.e. ""US v $124,700"" In this somewhat bizarre system of ""justice"", the owner need not be charged with a crime, and is not in immediate peril of going to prison (about the only upside in this, but might be temporary because the authorities haven't charged the owner yet).  When only the money is charged with a crime, there is no requirement for the government to supply a public defender for the owners who can not afford a lawyer.... can not afford a lawyer, because the government took all their money...." Why would you even accept 75K in cash? If anything is going to trigger an audit, this will be it. 75K in cash deposited will look like money laundring, so you better have a paper trail ready to prove this is legal or this won't end well. There is no bank that I know of offering such a feature and I'm not sure what the point of it would be (other than to annoy their customers). If you've been subjected to a fraudulent check your best bet is to either choose to write checks only to trusted parties and/or use your banks BillPay service (they usually issue checks on another account while transferring the money from your account). The drawbacks of your current plan, bounced legitimate checks and high maintenance nature, outweigh the potential benefits of catching a fraudulent check since you're not legally obligated to pay checks you haven't written.