As I’m sure you know, Maria and I have put a lot of effort into putting the good financial management practices from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University into effect in our lives. I mean, we did just pay off a massive amount of debt. The results of these practices have been fantastic for our lives together.
However, there is just one little thing. Let me tell you a story.
Like a lot of guys, I like to buy my girl flowers on occasion. She likes getting them, I like giving them, and it shows Maria my continuing love for her. I most recently decided to buy Maria flowers last week. Maria has been back at school getting her classroom ready for the start of school, so I decided to order them online and have the flowers delivered to her at school. While ordering, I decided to do it on our debit card through PayPal, figuring that it would only say “PayPal” in the bank statement, on the chance that Maria looked at our checking account and saw the charge.
So, the day after I ordered the flowers, but the day before they were to arrive, Maria and I were sitting in our office. I was reviewing documents for work and Maria was balancing our checkbook. I was deep into my work when Maria asked, “Did you buy flowers for someone?” My first thought was, “Crap, how’d she figure it out?”
Apparently, unlike I had assumed, PayPal doesn’t hide the name of the vendor you made the purchase from in your bank account statement. So as Maria was going through our checking account, she saw “PayPal 1-800-Flowers” and wondered why the heck that charge was there. She knew she hadn’t bought anyone flowers, so that left me as the only person who could have made that charge.
I am a terrible liar. Always have been. Maria would have seen right through me if I had tried to make something up. So, sighing, I just told her the truth: the flowers were for her and she should expect them tomorrow at work. Maria felt bad that the surprise was spoiled, but it wasn’t anybody’s fault. We just pay too much attention to our finances to miss a charge in our bank account like that.
Despite knowing that they were coming, Maria still appreciated the flowers and they were quite lovely.
The spoiled surprise flowers actually brought this problem to our attention early considering that both of our birthdays and Christmas are coming up in the next few months. We will have to figure out how to our gifts for each other a secret now that we only have one checking account between the two of us. One thought we had was to get Visa gift card or something similar, but those usually come with activation fees. If you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them!
If you plan on physically shopping at a store, I’d recommend cash… That’s the only thing I can think of!
Cash in a physical store is a great partial solution, but we do a ton of online shopping, too. Thanks for the thought!
We buy gift cards at the local grocery store and get fuel points. The variety of stores, physical and on-line, keeps increasing. Sometimes the stores has quadruple fuel points on gift card purchases and I buy extras for gifts.
That’s a pretty interesting idea. We’ll have to look into that. Thanks!
My fiancé and I have a joint account, but we both each have a separate account as well. 80% of our income goes into the joint account, 20% goes into our personal. It makes it easy for surprises….or when I want to spend on my classroom!
We hadn’t really considered separate accounts. We’ll have to keep that one in mind, but I don’t know if that’s the direction we want to go in quite yet. Thanks for the suggestion!
Set a budget for spending for birthday’s/holidays. Withdrawl that money as cash then purchase gifts using local vendors. Support local business and ensure a great surprise. Win-Win!
My husband and I have a joint account for all bills and family expenses. We have a separate for our “allowances”. It has worked great for years. We just have a set amount and its transferred every payday.
Do you each have any “blow” money set aside each month to use as you wish? Dave recommends it. We originally had $50 each but with increases in some bills that amount went way down. I keep a separate cash envelope just for this and don’t even use it some months so I can easily use it for a surprise gift!
We haven’t for a while, but we do set aside money for entertainment, which often gets used for the same purposes.
My husband and I withdraw cash from our checking account to avoid that. If you do a lot of online shopping you could always purchase a gift card from the store you are planning to purchase from. A lot of grocery stores and pharmacy stores sell gift cards without a fee :)
How would someone find out more information on the Dave Ramsey financial planning?
We have talked about Dave Ramsey multiple times on our blog here, so you can get started right here! The best post to take a look at is this one: https://crazytogether.com/love-financial-peace-university/ Other than that, I’d recommend going to http://www.daveramsey.com and looking into Financial Peace University or purchasing your own copy of The Total Money Makeover. Feel free to email us at crazytogetherblog@gmail.com if you have any more questions! Good luck!
John and I have had shared accounts for the last 22 years and, yes, surprises are really hard. After all these years and the discipline of putting all charges into the budget, many surprises have been found out early. John will tell you to shop Christmas Eve, since charges take a few hours to appear. I can’t do that and I doubt Maria would either! So I keep the budget and he uses cash.The one thing we have always done is given ourselves a personal budget account. (I would find a local florist though.)
My husband and I carefully budget and watch our money. In the past he’s been caught buying something sweet as a surprise. He still complains about it from time to time but for big things like holidays or birthdays the rule is the gift giver needs to keep an eye on the bills for that time period to avoid seeing the transaction. Buying from somewhere like amazon is also helpful because unless you actually click on the transaction you don’t see what was purchased.
We have bee married 21 years and actually avoid gifts! We put that money toward our travel budget. For us, travel, and the experiences and memories it creates, is a gift that lasts forever.
we each pick a specific bank account or credit card and are in charge of that one account individually until after the holidays so we don’t ruin the surprise of where we bought the presents from. worked great so far :)
Almost everything we purchase is from Amazon… so when purchasing online, there is nothing in the “memo” or “notes” section until I go in and manually add what was purchased at that time. In the case of Christmas or birthdays, we give each other a budget, set the time when we will be purchasing it (say, in between Monday and Friday two weeks before the birthday), and then make each other PROMISE we won’t look at the individual transactions going through the accounts. If we know we are spending $100 on the person, all that needs to be known is that $100 is coming out of the accounts and we don’t need to know when/where the items were purchased. Hope that helps!
We also use the Dave Ramsey envelope/cash system, but we do have a certain amount in our account earmarked for online only purchases, should they become necessary, and we build all that into our budget each month. When a birthday or holiday is approaching, we are just honest and say “please don’t look at the bank statement until after your birthday, you’ll see where I bought you something” and we are ok with that. It doesn’t help with surprise purchases, obviously, but it helps keep WHAT we buy for birthdays/holidays a little bit of a surprise.
Thanks! It seems that promising to not review the bank account is a common solution. I’m thinking we’ll have to give it a try!
Oops, I must have hit “post” too soon. We have just my school loans to pay off, but no other debt. We need to save for cars (ours are really old) and a house, but we have our emergency savings and are saving for retirement. We’re not sure what to do first though. We did the debt snowball years ago and loved it.
By the way, Maria, I love Kinder Craze. I just began teaching kindergarten and you have no idea how much you have helped me. Thank you!
If you have separate Paypal accounts and you want to do shopping online why not just transfer some funds to Paypal directly, then pay out of the Paypal balance?
I know I’m way late since Christmas is over, but my husband and I went through the SAME thing this Christmas. He and I were married in May of last year, combined our accounts, and established a joint budget before the end of the summer! And this was a HUGE concern for him!
I’m the budgeter, I’m the balancer, and I’m the one that passes out the personal money, but like you, we do MAJOR online shopping at Christmas. I was safe…he rarely looks at the checking account. But anything he purchased I would most certainly know about. So, this was our plan–
We have ONE credit card. Chris had it before we were married….before Dave Ramsey became a part of our life…but it has a 0-balance and anything that goes on it gets paid off almost instantaneously. So, I told him he could use that, and then after Christmas I logged on to pay it off (still before the payment was due)!
Hope you both found your way!
Haha! It’s all good, Bethany! That’s not a bad method, but we have cut up all Maria’s credit cards (since I never had any myself) and closed her accounts. We’re trying to stick as close as we can to Dave’s teachings in Financial Peace University. We just made a promise to not peek too much at the checking account and it worked pretty well. We kept an eye on the balance to be sure that there wasn’t any fraud going on, but nothing more than that.
Well, she might have known she was getting flowers, but she didn’t know what *kind*! I have really been enjoying your blog. You guys have inspired me to take control of my finances and I will be working on my budget and ordering FPU later today.
Thanks for the nice comment, Aimee! We’re glad we can help inspire you to take control of your finances. Good luck and I hope we can help keep you inspired!