“how’s married life treating you?” Christmas Edition
Although Tom and I have spent at least some part of all of our Christmases as a couple together, this will be our first Christmas together as a married couple, which more importantly means this is the first Christmas on a shared checking account. Which sort of throws a wrench into the whole thing.
Things I would otherwise think of getting him- prepaid WoW cards and such- are kind of lame now. “Wow, you bought me two months of World of Warcraft! With the money I would have used to buy two months of World of Warcraft!”
Meanwhile, if I want to spoil him with something a little more extravagant that he might not have thought to buy for himself, I feel like I have to clear the expenditure with him so we know where our money is going. “Honey, is it okay if I spend $300? What for? Well, I want to get blah-blah-blah for you for Christmas. …D’oh!”
Not that I’m complaining. It’s going to be a very merry Christmas, and I think I’ve managed to come up with a surprise or two… And other people manage to figure this stuff out. I’m sure we will too. 
December 20th, 2006 at 5:43 pm
Toni has a discretionary spending account. The idea here is that it’s for things that aren’t joint, or which I would otherwise likely complain about. So if she wants to spend $850 on a set of Hello Kitty bling hubcaps for her car, it doesn’t bother me one bit, as long as she can cover it out of that account. The benefit here is that it cuts through about 95% of the disagreements that we would otherwise expect to have, and it gives her a place to meaningfully draw from for gifts and the like. But at the same time we get the benefits of shared finances.
As for me? I’m so stingy that I’ve never felt the need to have such an account… I’m the kind that would probably rather just hoard it than spend it. There was, however, this one time that I saw a solar watch that I thought was oh so cool, and then we discussed it at length… Toni was so moved with pity at my stinginess that she just bought the thing for me out of her fund and declared it to be a gift.
Or you could just go for that whole homemade and/or non-monetary gift thing. Bah.
December 22nd, 2006 at 10:47 am
I think it works itself out when there’s enough money in our accounts that a significant debit would go relatively unnoticed. And hopefully our definition of “significant debit” will improve over time!!!
December 25th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I had the same issue when I was married/living in sin with joint checking. We opted for the budgeted approach: we each got $x to spend on the other for the holidays. It worked pretty well.