BellaOnline Forums Relationships Marriage who pays for what...

If a friend of yours gets married and you and your spouse go to the wedding, who pays for the "money gift?" This would be your friend and not your spouse's friend.

Is it the same with relatives? Does he pay for his and you pay for yours?

I'd be interested in how other couples work this out.

This is how my husband and I deal with our money. Basically every month we make a budget for everything we need the next month. For the most part it stays the same, rent, food, gas etc. My pay checks always vary so we just pick a round number that we KNOW I'll be getting that month. (anything extra on my checks we decide what to do with it when I get paid, whether it's more spending money, put away for vacation, gifts, clothes, etc) Everytime he gets paid we give ourselves "spending" money. It's always the same amount of money and we both get our own to spend on what ever we feel like having or doing. This is our personal money and if we spend it all before he gets paid again then tough luck lol.. When it comes to birthdays and christmas presents for family and friends. Basically we include it into our budget and we'll allot each of us the same amount of money to buy for whoever it is for and both of our names go on the gift. I have a bigger family than my husband and he only buys for his parents and siblings at christmas time because its generally just them for dinner etc, but my family theres always like 30 people there and we do a secret santa thing or we buy for all the kids etc, so since we get the same amount of money for gifts what we generally do is we give ourselves enough money to buy for our parents and siblings, and if I feel like doing the secret santa/kids thing with my family, depending on our finances at that time I'll get a bit more so I can buy small little gifts for them, or I'll just use my own money. A situation like MY friends birthday or a small event like that I would probably buy something out of my own 'spending' money But if its for a big event like a wedding we'd probably just put the money aside out of our budget. Even though it's MY friends wedding, my husband would still be there, and the gift would still be coming from both of us. I really like the way we do our money. We budget for everything. We know that he gets his haircut like every 8 weeks or so, so every couple of months we include $15 for that, I go through some medicine every 3-4 months so that's included too. We also include things like bank fees (basically anything of neccesity, like new work clothes, shoes etc.) I noticed with a lot of my friends they just pay for everything and IF theres anything left over they'll use it as spending, or they'll pay for MOST things but realize that theres nothing left over to spend so they'll take money away from a certain bill so they have something to spend. The way we do it allows us to always have some spending cash, and always always have our bills paid for. The other thing we do is when we get our spending money, we always get it in cash, and everything else stays in the bank. I rarely pay for things with my debit card. It's really nice to include a budget for spending money

Your system sounds great Lala! And you and your husband have a real partnership.

Thanks Kristen... I came from a family who didn't know how to manage their money, and my husband came from a family who really did know how to budget, so I've learned alot from my husband in that way. It just makes life much more simple to just take 20 minutes to write up a budget and stick to it. That way we both get all that we need and want. He generally writes up the budget and then I'll take a look over it incase he forgot something.

lala21's advice is good money management advice however it doesn't get to the relationship issues. Trust is an essential part of any marriage and when trust is erroded the relationship suffers. Unfortunately the way couples handle money is often a source for such trust issues and these often stem from spouses holding the money they earn close to their own hearts. This highlights selfishness issues in the relationship and points to a distance between husband and wife. In extreme cases such couples have been refered to as married singles a husband and wife living their own lives under the same roof. A better way to think of the assets in a marriage is to regard them all as jointly owned by husband and wife. Then your original question becomes not who should pay the money gift but how much should 'we' give. Husband and wife coming into agreement in this way can only draw a couple closer together, build trust, and remove the possibility of trust over money issues being erroded and becoming a serious issue in the marriage.

I believe I see where you are coming from and your point of view is a religious one. That is good and works well for many couples. However couples whom I have surveyed, in my seminars and as a Relationship Coach, have all come up with different ideas about "who pays what."

Some feel that if it is a friend or colleague of only one spouse, then that spouse gives the money gift. Some feel that everyting is divided equally. There is no one generic formula for all couples.

As far as living as "married singles," it is a modern trend.

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We just toss it all into one pot and use what we need.We are both self-emplyed so we have business accounts that are seperate. We are we for everything else. I use my own money a lot but my hubby is a trucker and is gone all week so I manage all the money anyway.

Working in this field, some couples must keep it seperate for it to work. Some couples just let one handle all of it. It most frequently depends on how much money they have, and if both contribute. Some never worry, some always worry. There's no one size fits all in this category. At our house the gift would be bought by me, who gets all of the money to pay all of the bills, how much we would spend would depend on how close we were to the recipient. We've been married so long that most of the gift giving is to joint family and friends, seldom one.