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
