Awkward financial situations every couple face
Awkward Financial Situations Every Couple Faces
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When you join lives, you have no choice but to join your finances. You certainly don’t need to actually join bank accounts, make your partner a beneficiary of your life insurance policy, or add your honey to your credit card. Those are decisions that come much later. But even if you’re just a couple who has been together in the three to five year range and lives together, your financial situations begin to affect one another’s. If you want to spend time together, live under the same roof, and build a future with one another, you can’t act like money isn’t a thing. Money comes up several times a day. Who are we kidding? It’s lurking behind most of our conversations. When you so much as pick out a restaurant for dinner, you’re both thinking about the prices. Here are awkward financial situations every couple faces.
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Your friend’s destination wedding
When your friend invites you to her destination wedding, allowing your partner as your plus one, is your partner on the hook for his own $800 plane ticket and his $300 portion of the hotel?
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Giving other couples gifts
So you’d like to give a gift to your downstairs neighbors for the holidays. Both you and your partner have become close with them but, admittedly, you’re closer to them than he is. You might not agree on whether or not to split the gift 50/50, since, if it weren’t for you, he wouldn’t be getting them anything at all.
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Having his friends over for dinner
When you host his buddies for dinner—and a lot of them—should you and your partner split the cost of food and alcohol right down the middle? I mean, this is really his guys’ night that you’re just present for.
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Taking expensive cabs to your friend’s birthday
It’s your friend’s birthday, and she is having it a good half hour Uber ride away. But, while she is your friend, your boyfriend has actually become close with her boyfriend over the years, and he will enjoy this just as much as you will. So, are you responsible for paying for both of these rides?
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Who buys/uses the most toilet paper?
You are the only one who seems to buy toilet paper for the place. That being said, you’re a woman, so you use it each time you pee. You also have irritable bowel syndrome and just use a ton of toilet paper. Is it entirely fair for your man to pay for half the TP, when he only uses 20 percent of it?
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Who buys/uses the most olive oil?
You’d be amazed what a major expense olive oil is. You notice it when two people are going through the bottle. You may easily spend $30 a month on olive oil, just for sauteeing vegetables and making salad dressing. It’s impossible to know who uses the most of it (but you know it’s him).
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When only one can afford the pricey apartment
You found an apartment that you love. Your partner can’t possibly afford to pay half the rent, but you could actually easily pay three quarters of it. And you’re happy to! You just want to live there…but it’s never easy for somebody (especially men) to just let someone pay for part of their rent.
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When one person is unemployed for a while
What do you do if your partner is unemployed for a while, needs to save money, can’t really go out, but you want to go out? Do you just pay for him? What if he won’t let you? Does that mean you have to either go out without him, or stay in to be with him?
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Who buys the furniture?
You’d love to think that you’ll be together forever. But, do you believe that enough to, say, go halfsies on your furniture? All $3,000 worth of it? That will be a mess to split up if you two, well, split up.
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When your parents take you both to dinner
Your parents come to town and want to go to dinner with you and your partner. He wants to try to pay for them, but they’re insisting on going to a pricey place. He doesn’t want to make them sacrifice the place they want, but he also can’t pick up the check there. It will happen more than you think.
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Time to start splitting date night
At some point, your partner can’t be expected to foot the bill on every date night. So what do you do? Take turns? Split it every time? But it’s more fun when you treat each other—it feels special. But how come one person always winds up with the bill on the more expensive nights?
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Vacation budget: for each other, or for friends?
If you can only afford to go on one vacation every year, do you go with just each other? Do you bring along friends? But you have to each like every friend you invite because these are you precious vacation dollars. Can you go on a girls’ trip with your vacation budget? That may cause a fight.
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Birthday gift: thing, or activity?
Sometimes you can only afford to buy your partner a physical object or an experience for his birthday. And sometimes you have to tell him as much.
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One of you doesn’t know how to budget
It’s not an easy day when you need to sit down and tell your partner that the way he spends money is ridiculous and if he doesn’t do something about it, he’ll affect your financial situation in the future. But ultimately, you just have to teach your partner how to use coupons.
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Does the one who broke it pay for it?
First, can you ever really come to a consensus on who broke the toilet? It could be either of you. Even if you determine who broke it, maybe it was just bad luck—it was a finicky old toilet that was bound to break eventually. Should you have to pay for it, just because you had the bad luck of breaking it?
