We usually buy gifts together. Is that weird? If we have extra money or a holiday rolls around we’ll go out and look at stuff we want and buy it for ourselves but we’ll do it together. That way we always get what we want, and we have fun together at the same time.
Sometimes I do surprise him but it’s with little things. We don’t have a lot of money so I might pick him some small thing up I see I know he’ll like, like a used game from Game Stop. We’ll eat beans a few nights instead of meat to cover that expense and he won’t even notice.
We each have our own credit cards from before we met, but I do all the bill paying, so I see his credit card statement. I just hand him his and ask him if it looks all right, and then I pay it. Sometimes he’ll say “Don’t look at my Visa bill before your birthday,” and then I won’t look. He never bothers with mine.
Most of our shopping is done with credit cards. Not only do we not scrutinize each other’s CC bills, but major gifts are rarely bought far in advance of the occasion. Bottom line, charges for gifts are rarely seen by the receiver until after the gift has been given.
Moreover, major gifts also often are the result of some discussion to assure that they are wanted and have the desired features. Example: wife gave me an iPod for my B-day last year, and because it was discussed beforehand, she got me one with enough capacity for our entire music collection (instead of just part of it).
We share a credit card which we use for pretty much all our expenses. I handle all the billpaying / Quicken-downloading. If I download a transaction I don’t recognize, I’ll ask “did I see that?” and if the answer is no, So, I know where a purchase was made, but not what it was.
I also encourage him to use his own credit card for such purchases (we each have an individual card as well as the shared one). The downside to that is, he won’t necessarily let me know about a purchase, I won’t necessarily look for any purchases, so it’s led to late payments once or twice. I’ve learned to ask, around holiday/birthday times.
My ex used to handle the finances. I didn’t look at the account during gift-buying times. For her, I’d usually pull out cash. No questions were asked. We were both all about keeping surprises a surprise.
Of course, the one year we bought each other the same gift was pretty comical…
Don’t care about surprises. Really I don’t. In fact, I usually send him out with pretty darn specific gift requests (and he seldom strays too much). I handle the bills.
We don’t often buy each other gifts. We do have separate discretionary allowances in our bookkeeping excel sheet, and so I might in theory put something on my account that I purchased for him or viceversa, in practice it rarely comes up. This is true for the larger family as well: in recent years, my parents have sent us a check at Christmas, but before that, I never really got much for birthdays or Christmas after puberty. My parents were and are insanely generous, but it was never tied to occasions.
Back when we bought gifts from paper catalogs using paper checks we had a category called TYL (Tell You Later) for gifts. By the time we got the statement the gift was given and I could change the Quicken entry to the right thing. We don’t look at our credit card statement online, so it is not a problem. We have separate Amazon accounts also.
My Wife and I are both 50 yo. Been married going on 14 years.
We have always had our own checking, saving and credit cards. Never been a problem. I pay some bills, she pays some bills. We both pay our own credit cards. So buying gifts is not an issue at all. Often, we hint pretty heavily, but even more often, there is nothing that we really need. Sometimes we just both shop for a piece of art. That has worked well for anniversaries.
We each seem to buy a new car every 10 years or so. That way, each one of us would have a car payment for 4-5 years, and then no payment for 4-5 years. We each drive our own car pretty much exclusively, but will often use the newest car for longer road trips.
If one of us is making a car payment, we jockey the bills around a bit. It’s never been an issue at all.
We each have separate checking accounts, and we have a joint account. We also have joint credit cards. I handle all of our finances, so I can see any transaction she does in any of the accounts. If my wife really wants to keep something a secret she has to pay cash, but the reality is that she doesn’t think about the fact that I can see all of her transactions and she can’t see any of mine (or her own, for that matter). She buys me something, I see the transaction, I say nothing, she thinks she has surprised me, and I pretend that she has surprised me.
Salaries and bills are handled in a joint account, and under most circumstances, it doesn’t really matter if gifts are purchased out of it (neither of us checks it in that sort of way). But if it needs to be super-duper top secret, I have other sources of funds such as my PayPal balance and an online savings account that my Google Ad revenue goes into.