AIBU to tell him to buy his own food

It is really sad that you have inflicted this man on your children.

He is so controlling.
You all deserve so much better.

I fail to see the reasoning of marrying someone you never lived with, to find this shitshow as a result.

So, then he does acknowledge it’s a ‘him’ thing. He just thinks he knows best and you should do as he says. This is incredibly controlling behaviour.

When you row about this, is he getting how seriously fucked up it all is? Or is it just being dismissed as you being silly?

his food shopping shouldn’t come out of your pocket though

I would go through your food bill in huge detail down to “you had 200g of pasta and I had 100g”

”I had 4 busicuits and you had 2”

If the joint account is for bills, can you just put it to him that "bills" also includes the costs of joint purchases and joint activities like presents, holidays, meals out etc? Would it make him any happier if you just agreed that each of you would put in an extra, say, £50-100 per month to cover them?

Option 2 sounds the best for now. Will he demand the receipts from the grocery shopping so he can go through it and make sure you’re not “overcharging” him? What about if you buy Tesco bread, for example, instead of Aldi bread? Will he pay the Tesco price or the Aldi price because he’s happy with the cheaper version? Will he start paying for a higher percentage of evening meal ingredients? After all, you and your children have one serve each and he has two so he should pay more according to his system, right?

You might want to start looking for a marriage counsellor. You’ll probably need the help to get on the same page and live together peacefully.

Hire a cleaner while you’re sorting things out. If he doesn’t want to pay his half for a cleaner then he needs to do the equivalent housework that the cleaner would have done, to a good standard and every week/fortnight. No excuses.

Please tell me that he at least manages to not splash pee all around the toilet or on the seat. It seems to be a theme on here that twat men piss like an untrained feral animal.

Why does he shower three times a day? How is his skin not a dry itchy mess? Just curious. Is it in the morning before work, after exercise and before bed?

He’s making a fuss over you spending £40 for his sisters?! Yeah, I’d be telling him to fuck right off.
He’s a controlling idiot and I’d go for your option 3. @BugOnARugDrinkingTeaFromAMug

3 - Go back to living separately or divorce. Bit soon for this option, I am not ready to throw my marriage away yet when we could potentially overcome it with a bit of work.

Is HE prepared to throw it all away though? Insist on inflexibility and have it land on divorce? I get that it’s best to find a way of compromising BUT for that to work, both people have to move positions, not just you
All I've heard is solutions for you to bend in an effort to accommodate him Where is his willingness to compromise?

Man, I'm never having a joint bank account me. Sounds like a right pain in the backside.

You know. There are couples who don't live together, married or not. Some people aren't compatible with sharing a house. It doesn't mean splitting up.

if he was controlling I wouldn't have access to the account at all.

What did you respond to that insanity?

I initially thought this could be resolved by clear boundaries on your part, but now I think you guys need counselling. Or option 3. This man does not respect you.

Oh holy shit. Did you correct him and tell him that he might not have access to the account? Why does he assume that he’s the king of the castle? That you could choose to have no joint account with him?

How does he propose paying for shared things like gifts for family/friends, movie tickets, a meal out together, a play or concert? Surely adding in extra to the joint account for those types of expenses would be sensible.

I’m glad he’s civilised and is a tidy pee-er. There’s a small mercy. I guess at least with all the showers he’s not leaving skid marks on the sheets or expecting you to go near a cheesy penis!

Not asking for figures, but I'm curious as to how much he thinks the joint account buffer should be, and exactly what he would expect it to be spent on? For example, it is for a new washing machine or new bedding for the bed you share?
I would probably go option 2, but possibly with a built in buffer which is the minimum balance in the account.
Completely agree with you re the £40, that would be a step too far for me.

Some of the comments on here have tickled me, how recent is this house change OP?
It suggests that actually your DH is anxious about something related to money but not current income and he's now fixated on it that this is the reasonable solution in his head to stop that issue.
Had any health scares lately, or a family member has? He needs to remember the joint account is not a savings account, it is money to spend. What about having a joint savings account, do you have one? Do you have decent life insurance that enables him to sort the house out (outside of what your DC would also receive).
Or just go with Option 3, accept he's going to moan and just nod your head say yes dear let him moan and hopefully that puts it to bed (til next time). Would he drop it if you didn't disagree with his 'rule' on topping it back up but just didn't do it? Why can't he top it up with his bit if he wants but not you?

It's common with ND people to fixate on something as a solution to an anxious process even if it's not related to the actual issue.
BUT you are right to put your foot down and say no I can spend what I want to in your circumstances.

Why are you asking him what the authorised transactions would be?

Why is he the manager/boss of expenditure? You are both grown adults, you both have equal say!

He doesn’t have any respect for you and makes comments about any decision that you make as an adult.

So he stayed at your house 90% of the time before you lived together….was he contributing then? Probably not.

As someone said upthread, why are you doing all the compromising and he is not?

When I first started reading his position didn't make much sense, but now I think I can see the issue to some extent.

He can do the food shop cheaper than you, he thinks he can do it for £120, so that is what he thinks it should be (because he prefers to buy cheaper food) you have set a budget of £150 but you always go over it, so he thinks you are being wasteful spending an extra £50-£60, over the £120 a week when it is "unnecessary".. he does have a point in some ways, you have differences in taste and what you like to buy, so even though you pay for anything over £150 if it was up to him it should be coming in at £120.

The easy answer is to work out exactly what he would use in a month, and split it down to prove him right or wrong (a bit petty), or he pay his half of the £120 a week and you pay the extra which gives you freedom to spend whatever you like, on whoever you like, but you need to tell him that if that is the situation going forward, there will be no more moaning about the food shop ever.. I'd do this to be honest.

Also, I think paying for peoples gifts willy nilly out of the joint account is quite subjective, we absolutely don't do that, I buy my family and he buys his family anyway, but if we each want to make unilateral decisions about joint spending, or impulse buys for anything they come out of own accounts and we settle it up later once we've talked about it. If he started spending 'my' money on gifts for his family without asking me, or impulse buys, I'd actually not like it to be honest and I'm sure my DH would feel the same, we respect each others wishes.

We came to the marriage as two very independent people with separate finances, and I like it that way, so IMO joint account should just be for absolute necessities, household expenses and bills, anything else, like luxuries, keep separate, then sit down every week/month and settle up if you need to.

It is very rare for two people to absolutely agree on spending, so you need to remove it as an issue rather than fight over it, from his point of view if he agrees to your way he is forced to keep adding money in the JA for things he hasn't agreed to, which leads to annoyance. Or if you do it his way (like our way above, bare bones spending on the JA) all you have to do is trust he will make it good anything he actually owes you.. so if you know he will do that, just do it that way as it works out in the end.

Oh, @BugOnARugDrinkingTeaFromAMug …

You know that ‘the Boots incident’ is the easiest and most flexible he’s going to be, going forward?

As he gets older he will become more inflexible, more intransigent, more reactive when you do anything he hasn’t already marked on his spreadsheet.

Is this what you want?

I honestly do not think this marriage is viable for you with the two of you living together. And I’m not sure it’s good for him either as he focuses ever more closely on your every move, winding himself up to apoplexy.

You responded earlier to say that you of course didn’t know how his controlling impulses would escalate once you merged your households. There would be no shame in admitting to yourself that the situation is beyond anything you had imagined.

I would not stay in such a situation. I don’t think you should, either.

I would hold firm here. It seems all the compromise seems to be from you, which is likely reinforcing in his mind that not only is he right, but that if he keeps pushing then you will give in to him. He’s not appeased, he’s encouraged.

Start shopping at tesco again, and I would shut down any criticism. You don’t need to justify your personal spending to him. If he tell you it’s stupid? Don’t get drawn into debate, just tell him you’re not asking for his opinion and to keep it to himself.

I do think this is a major incompatibility though, and that it’s something that will eventually eat away at the rest of the relationship.

To add, and yes, be very strict on what the joint account is for. I would keep it strictly for bills. Sort out gifts for your own respective families from your own accounts.

The joint account for any joint expenditure but an agreement on an upper limit for purchases without discussion.

I don't think he will want that even if he agrees to it, so there's no point pushing, you seem to be wanting 'your' way out of this, in that you can spend freely on the joint account whenever you like, and that would normally be fine for most couples, but the truth is you've married and now moved in with someone with extreme issues around spending and saving, and it doesn't sound entirely within his control, if it is something like OCD as you suspect, then he can't help being that way, he is very much in control of his own finances (cutting his own hair and paying £10 into his savings etc) and he obviously sees the joint account as part of his finances, there's no reason to fight against that for the "principle" of it tbh.

The ONLY way to deal with it is to keep your finances completely separate (faffy), or the easy way, just use the joint account for essentials, and household bills only, keep a buffer in there (ours used to be £1000), then if you need a new washer, or want to book a holiday, you talk about it, agree and then do it, then decide how best to built back up your buffer.

Then if you want to buy something impulsively, luxuries, gifts etc, either buy it yourself then settle up (as applicable if a joint endeavour) or talk about it before you do anything so you are both on the same page about it, that way you get the best of both worlds and he doesn't have the stress of 'unexpected spending' sending him into a spiral.. "joint" spending against his knowledge is the trigger here, and there's no reason for that to happen at all.