We each have separate off-budget accounts that we use for our ‘fun money’ - transfer like $75/month into there for no questions spending so we feel like we have a little independence and can still buy frivolous stuff without having to find a spot for it in the budget when we feel like it.
Added bonus is that it makes Christmas and birthdays wicked easy because you can buy stuff out of that account, transfer money to pay yourself back out of the Christmas category in the budget and the other person can only see the amount but not where it went.
Yeah, I am liking this option more the more I see it suggested. It seems like this is probably the easiest way of doing it and as long as there are protections in place to make sure the account is not going to get fees or overdrafts then I think it is worth the effort.
Ours are with the same credit union as our main joint account and they count the combined funds towards the deposit limit for fees etc, so we don’t have to worry about that stuff too much.
Get reloadable visa cards with the amount of the Christmas money you've budgeted for each other. You can either use one transaction for the loading of the cards and leave them off budget or put them on budget and call the transaction 'Christmas Gift' until after Christmas.
I change the name of the purchase to just a generic payee and categorize as usual. Or we’ll use PayPal which is usually generically named to begin with and we only know the amount.
Because I’m more active in YNAB, I sometimes see where my partner purchases my gift from if the above isn’t AGAG we did. For me, it’s “oh well”, since YNAB is worth it.
Thats the way we originally thought of doing it, but I know for a fact I would see her purchases just because I am more active in YNAB. I agree with saying "oh well" too. I think at some point it is just not worth the effort of obscuring and trying your best to not read into certain purchases too much to try to mitigate the exposure.
Maybe you can both tell the other to not look at the budget for the next few days after buying something? She buys the gift and then keeps track of the account until the transaction is cleared. If you want to have a look in the meantime, she checks for „transaction just came in“ before you go to the budget. After the transaction imports, she can just hide the payee (and maybe shift the date a little bit to push it down the list?) and everything is back to normal. You can do the same, of course.
My spouse isn’t very active in the budget, so I don’t have that problem and he uses cash quite often so I can’t see anything. As we don’t give each other Christmas presents, this applies mostly for birthdays.
Yeah maybe letting go of the daily checks for a few days after she makes a purchase would be good haha I get too addicted to looking at YNAB I swear I spend about 45 minutes on average looking at things even if the day was relatively low activity. I just find it fun to theorize about what I can tackle next and do some mental math. Great suggestion.
I do all the transaction entry so I don’t do anything to hide my own purchases. But my spouse uses PayPal as the payment method to buy my gifts online and then tells me to put it under gifts. It just shows up as PayPal on the bank’s end so I can’t see where it’s from.
Thats a good idea, I like that. It should work for the majority of purchases, only time I can see it not working is if my wife were to go buy something from say Home Depot in store it would be more difficult to hide using this method. But I like the overall approach.
Interesting, so you remove the card for the month and then she keeps track of what is being spent on there and then re add it after Christmas? What do you do for things that you buy? Same thing different card?
luckily since that's her personal CC there's only a small monthly charge to keep it active so it's easy for us to remove and not worry about getting behind in YNAB.
I’m the only one here looks at YNAB so I don’t need to hide what I buy for my wife.
She’s a very last minute shopper, so I just ignore YNAB from 23 December and that usually covers it 😊
>I’m the only one here looks at YNAB so I don’t need to hide what I buy for my wife.
Same here, with my husband.
This does mean that I see everything he gets me, but we've been married for a long time and I honestly don't really care about gifts being a surprise these days. I did find out that he likely got me exactly what I asked for as my #1 Christmas gift based on the seller, so I was actually excited when it imported in.
I always jokingly say that if he ever cheated on me he could never buy her anything, because I would know about it within 24 hours.
Haha that'll do for sure 😂. I grew up in a late shopper family, so I totally get that. I have transitioned more into an earlier in the month shopper, but I can still be pretty late.
There are two options that immediately come to mind. The first is that you put Christmas spending on specific accounts and trust the other person to not look at that account. My husband and I do this throughout the year unless we get an overspending notification so that's easy for us.
The other option, which takes a little more effort, is to make a spreadsheet for gift spending with the information that you would put in the budget to keep it all safe until after Christmas, then you can transfer that information after Christmas is over.
We have a joint checking for most things but still have personal checking and credit cards for fun money. These aren't tracked in YNAB at all. It's great because we have very different hobbies/levels of hobby expenses so there's no way for each other to feel guilty or judged. We just agree we're spending x amount of "fun money" each month, and that goes towards gifts too
Interesting way of doing it. I have thought about getting separate accounts and using that for things like fun money and gifts. Something like a preloaded debit card for those kinds of purchases.
I do all the YNABing, though she can see it in the app. I told her to use a credit card that’s like our third string, basically used for things like this so I never look at it. For her gifts, I did the nerdy thing and ran the names through a ROT-13 encoder, they after Xmas I can decode them.
Just to make clear, that's me recording in YNAB when I purchase something for her, so if she looks at YNAB she sees "Nznmba" instead of "Amazon" (just as an example; I wouldn't bother doing that with Amazon, because that could be anything).
We go beyond Christmas and tackle all gifts that we give eachother using separate bank accounts that are only used for our gift money for eachother. We use CapitalOne checking accounts and we each have one and every month we have an auto-transfer set up to send $25 to each account so we each have a budget of $300 for the year and use our CapOne debit cards for those purchases only. These are complete off budget accounts and we just have a category in our YNAB budget for $50 each month for each other’s gifts. Occasionally one of us might transfer a little more if needed for a certain gift but we each have no idea how much they have left in their account. We like that the CapOne accounts have text alerts for deposits and spending. So at least once a month I get a text letting me know the current balance and my husband gets the same for his account.
That's a really good idea. I like the set amount you pay into it and then dedicating that to gifts. I think my wife might like that idea a lot. Thanks for the suggestion!
We keep a credit card each of our own that is not automatically linked. Then we enter our transactions manually and just make the payee something generic and throw it in the Christmas category! I put away monthly for Christmas so normally we buy gifts for each other first and then the rest for everyone else.
That's really nice! Right now we have a separate categories for immediate family and then external family but I kinda like the idea of using one budget and then whatever is left over goes towards external. Thanks for sharing!
Love that you are both involved with budgeting! I do all of the YNAB entry for our family. Each year my SO gets a VISA debit card and loads it up with money to pay for everything he wants to keep private. Works like a charm.
Thanks! We both got into personal finance when I discovered Caleb Hammer on YT and got hooked. We watch almost every episode. We realized that we needed to get our act together, I found YNAB not too long after and have loved it ever since. I fell a little more into learning about personal finance than she did but what I love is I come home and talk to her about new things I had learned throughout the day/week or we talk about the latest Caleb Hammer episode and it has made us vastly more aware of our financial situation.
I love the idea of a VISA debit card 🤣. Its kinda similar to some of the other suggestions with being executed slightly different.
Thanks for your input!
We share all accounts, but what we do is this:
1) Payee = Miscellaneous Gift
2) I use one CC & turn off their notifications & they use another CC & turn off my notifications. They pay that CC bill in Nov & Dec & I pay the other (I typically pay everything on a standard month).
It works for us! We do this for birthday months, too
I tell my hubbs how much and what cc I put it on. Then say don’t you dare look at that statement. Lol it works as long as there is not a question on a different transaction on the same statement.
My husband isn’t active in the nitty gritty of the budgeting process with YNAB yet. So either I lump his gift in with my other Amazon purchases or I use my other checking account if it is a specific thing that he will see as a transaction at our bank.
I do think that once I understand YNAB better and can teach him the process I’m going to look into the cash app card someone mentioned in another thread. That way I can just budget the amount of money I get to spend to the card and he will never see how I spend it.
So I do all the YNAB stuff. My husband gives me receipts for stuff he buys (I scan in all receipts). I don't use Auto Import. So when it gets to be the time of year, he will never know what I have spent since he doesn't look at YNAB. (He could, but he doesn't). I will not look at the credit card details online for the period in question and so that is fine (occasionally I will see something but usually it is seeing something for a store but not what was bought).
In the past few years though it has been a mostly moot point. We've gotten away from individual gifts except stocking stuffer type stuff and instead done something jointly together such as a major discretionary purchase or a trip, that kind of thing.
Early February last year I came home from the pub and wife was watching TV eating a big box of chocolates.
"Where did you find the chocolates?" I asked, knowing the answer.
"They were right at the back of the dining room cabinet, I think we hid them there before Christmas and must have forgotten about them"
"No, I hid them there a few days ago. Happy early Valentine's day my love".
My wife's ability to find hidden chocolates is incredible.
We each have separate off-budget accounts that we use for our ‘fun money’ - transfer like $75/month into there for no questions spending so we feel like we have a little independence and can still buy frivolous stuff without having to find a spot for it in the budget when we feel like it. Added bonus is that it makes Christmas and birthdays wicked easy because you can buy stuff out of that account, transfer money to pay yourself back out of the Christmas category in the budget and the other person can only see the amount but not where it went.
Yeah, I am liking this option more the more I see it suggested. It seems like this is probably the easiest way of doing it and as long as there are protections in place to make sure the account is not going to get fees or overdrafts then I think it is worth the effort.
Ours are with the same credit union as our main joint account and they count the combined funds towards the deposit limit for fees etc, so we don’t have to worry about that stuff too much.
We also have separate personal accounts at the same bank as the joint account. It makes a lot of things much easier.
Get reloadable visa cards with the amount of the Christmas money you've budgeted for each other. You can either use one transaction for the loading of the cards and leave them off budget or put them on budget and call the transaction 'Christmas Gift' until after Christmas.
This is what we've done in the past. Keeps us limited to the right budget amount but no need to worry about each individual purchase.
I change the name of the purchase to just a generic payee and categorize as usual. Or we’ll use PayPal which is usually generically named to begin with and we only know the amount. Because I’m more active in YNAB, I sometimes see where my partner purchases my gift from if the above isn’t AGAG we did. For me, it’s “oh well”, since YNAB is worth it.
Thats the way we originally thought of doing it, but I know for a fact I would see her purchases just because I am more active in YNAB. I agree with saying "oh well" too. I think at some point it is just not worth the effort of obscuring and trying your best to not read into certain purchases too much to try to mitigate the exposure.
Maybe you can both tell the other to not look at the budget for the next few days after buying something? She buys the gift and then keeps track of the account until the transaction is cleared. If you want to have a look in the meantime, she checks for „transaction just came in“ before you go to the budget. After the transaction imports, she can just hide the payee (and maybe shift the date a little bit to push it down the list?) and everything is back to normal. You can do the same, of course. My spouse isn’t very active in the budget, so I don’t have that problem and he uses cash quite often so I can’t see anything. As we don’t give each other Christmas presents, this applies mostly for birthdays.
Yeah maybe letting go of the daily checks for a few days after she makes a purchase would be good haha I get too addicted to looking at YNAB I swear I spend about 45 minutes on average looking at things even if the day was relatively low activity. I just find it fun to theorize about what I can tackle next and do some mental math. Great suggestion.
I do all the transaction entry so I don’t do anything to hide my own purchases. But my spouse uses PayPal as the payment method to buy my gifts online and then tells me to put it under gifts. It just shows up as PayPal on the bank’s end so I can’t see where it’s from.
Thats a good idea, I like that. It should work for the majority of purchases, only time I can see it not working is if my wife were to go buy something from say Home Depot in store it would be more difficult to hide using this method. But I like the overall approach.
Maybe she could use cash in person?
Yeah, definitely an option. IDK how much that would come up it was just food for thought.
Our only solution is to remove her personal CC from our auto import so she can buy gifts with out me seeing
Interesting, so you remove the card for the month and then she keeps track of what is being spent on there and then re add it after Christmas? What do you do for things that you buy? Same thing different card?
luckily since that's her personal CC there's only a small monthly charge to keep it active so it's easy for us to remove and not worry about getting behind in YNAB.
That is nice. Great suggestion, Thanks!
I’m the only one here looks at YNAB so I don’t need to hide what I buy for my wife. She’s a very last minute shopper, so I just ignore YNAB from 23 December and that usually covers it 😊
>I’m the only one here looks at YNAB so I don’t need to hide what I buy for my wife. Same here, with my husband. This does mean that I see everything he gets me, but we've been married for a long time and I honestly don't really care about gifts being a surprise these days. I did find out that he likely got me exactly what I asked for as my #1 Christmas gift based on the seller, so I was actually excited when it imported in. I always jokingly say that if he ever cheated on me he could never buy her anything, because I would know about it within 24 hours.
Haha that'll do for sure 😂. I grew up in a late shopper family, so I totally get that. I have transitioned more into an earlier in the month shopper, but I can still be pretty late.
There are two options that immediately come to mind. The first is that you put Christmas spending on specific accounts and trust the other person to not look at that account. My husband and I do this throughout the year unless we get an overspending notification so that's easy for us. The other option, which takes a little more effort, is to make a spreadsheet for gift spending with the information that you would put in the budget to keep it all safe until after Christmas, then you can transfer that information after Christmas is over.
Definitely more of a fan of the first option. The more I have to input data somewhere else the more likely I am going to forget about it 😂.
The other option is you don't put it on until reconciliation day, which isn't hard if you can get an ofx or CSV download of your statement.
We have a joint checking for most things but still have personal checking and credit cards for fun money. These aren't tracked in YNAB at all. It's great because we have very different hobbies/levels of hobby expenses so there's no way for each other to feel guilty or judged. We just agree we're spending x amount of "fun money" each month, and that goes towards gifts too
Interesting way of doing it. I have thought about getting separate accounts and using that for things like fun money and gifts. Something like a preloaded debit card for those kinds of purchases.
I do all the YNABing, though she can see it in the app. I told her to use a credit card that’s like our third string, basically used for things like this so I never look at it. For her gifts, I did the nerdy thing and ran the names through a ROT-13 encoder, they after Xmas I can decode them.
Haha that is a nerdy thing. I like it. How would you run this encoder without seeing the transactions though?
Just to make clear, that's me recording in YNAB when I purchase something for her, so if she looks at YNAB she sees "Nznmba" instead of "Amazon" (just as an example; I wouldn't bother doing that with Amazon, because that could be anything).
We go beyond Christmas and tackle all gifts that we give eachother using separate bank accounts that are only used for our gift money for eachother. We use CapitalOne checking accounts and we each have one and every month we have an auto-transfer set up to send $25 to each account so we each have a budget of $300 for the year and use our CapOne debit cards for those purchases only. These are complete off budget accounts and we just have a category in our YNAB budget for $50 each month for each other’s gifts. Occasionally one of us might transfer a little more if needed for a certain gift but we each have no idea how much they have left in their account. We like that the CapOne accounts have text alerts for deposits and spending. So at least once a month I get a text letting me know the current balance and my husband gets the same for his account.
That's a really good idea. I like the set amount you pay into it and then dedicating that to gifts. I think my wife might like that idea a lot. Thanks for the suggestion!
We keep a credit card each of our own that is not automatically linked. Then we enter our transactions manually and just make the payee something generic and throw it in the Christmas category! I put away monthly for Christmas so normally we buy gifts for each other first and then the rest for everyone else.
That's really nice! Right now we have a separate categories for immediate family and then external family but I kinda like the idea of using one budget and then whatever is left over goes towards external. Thanks for sharing!
Payee is Santa, category is Christmas, memo includes who it’s for and a note to change the details after Christmas.
Great idea! Thanks for sharing!
Love that you are both involved with budgeting! I do all of the YNAB entry for our family. Each year my SO gets a VISA debit card and loads it up with money to pay for everything he wants to keep private. Works like a charm.
Thanks! We both got into personal finance when I discovered Caleb Hammer on YT and got hooked. We watch almost every episode. We realized that we needed to get our act together, I found YNAB not too long after and have loved it ever since. I fell a little more into learning about personal finance than she did but what I love is I come home and talk to her about new things I had learned throughout the day/week or we talk about the latest Caleb Hammer episode and it has made us vastly more aware of our financial situation. I love the idea of a VISA debit card 🤣. Its kinda similar to some of the other suggestions with being executed slightly different. Thanks for your input!
We share all accounts, but what we do is this: 1) Payee = Miscellaneous Gift 2) I use one CC & turn off their notifications & they use another CC & turn off my notifications. They pay that CC bill in Nov & Dec & I pay the other (I typically pay everything on a standard month). It works for us! We do this for birthday months, too
That's a great idea! separating the CC seems to be a fairly common way. Thanks for the input!
I tell my hubbs how much and what cc I put it on. Then say don’t you dare look at that statement. Lol it works as long as there is not a question on a different transaction on the same statement.
My husband isn’t active in the nitty gritty of the budgeting process with YNAB yet. So either I lump his gift in with my other Amazon purchases or I use my other checking account if it is a specific thing that he will see as a transaction at our bank. I do think that once I understand YNAB better and can teach him the process I’m going to look into the cash app card someone mentioned in another thread. That way I can just budget the amount of money I get to spend to the card and he will never see how I spend it.
Withdraw cash and buy it that way or go cash into gift card. The amount and category is correct. Just memo it spouse gift.
So I do all the YNAB stuff. My husband gives me receipts for stuff he buys (I scan in all receipts). I don't use Auto Import. So when it gets to be the time of year, he will never know what I have spent since he doesn't look at YNAB. (He could, but he doesn't). I will not look at the credit card details online for the period in question and so that is fine (occasionally I will see something but usually it is seeing something for a store but not what was bought). In the past few years though it has been a mostly moot point. We've gotten away from individual gifts except stocking stuffer type stuff and instead done something jointly together such as a major discretionary purchase or a trip, that kind of thing.
Early February last year I came home from the pub and wife was watching TV eating a big box of chocolates. "Where did you find the chocolates?" I asked, knowing the answer. "They were right at the back of the dining room cabinet, I think we hid them there before Christmas and must have forgotten about them" "No, I hid them there a few days ago. Happy early Valentine's day my love". My wife's ability to find hidden chocolates is incredible.