Splitting household finances

[junipermarten]

This has been done to death on here but I'm looking for outsiders opinions on how we do things and if we might need to change it.

I know a lot of people have joint bank accounts with their partners/spouses but we never have and don't intend to. Once bitten and all that...

I pay for our online food shop each week however my husband will go out for top ups throughout the week and he pays for that. This is for the basics like bread/milk etc if we've run out. The problem is he doesn't just buy that, he will add on a ton of junk food and wine for himself and could spend between £30 and £60 each time. He can end up going to the shops 4 times a week (and no, we don't run out of bread and milk that often).

The issue is he perpetually has no money because he's using "his" spending money at the shops, I'll need to transfer him £100 here and there to keep him going. When I say to him he needs to watch what he's spending he gets defensive and says he's not frittering it away on nights out or anything and is just going to the shops for essentials. Basically telling me it's not his fault he's bought lots of chocolate/sweets/wine for the umpteenth time this week. This evening he tried to blame me because I'm never in the shops (true) so it has to come out of his money.

I've done a percentage breakdown this evening of our income/expenditure to see if he needs a larger share and I'm looking to see if perhaps I'm being too rigid.

He earns 40% of my income and it's broken down like this:
45% of his income is bills (including petrol)
10% comes to me to put into savings
45% is for him to spend

70% of my income is bills (including the weekly food shop)
12% for savings
18% for spending to match how much he has

I basically worked it out by taking off all the bills and giving us the same spending amount with some left for savings.

Unfortunately we haven't been able to save for a long while due to the COL increase/recently moving/MOT/car repairs etc etc but that is what I'm aiming for so we have a buffer for unexpected bills.

He's saying he doesn't have enough money and it's as if he's resentful that I'm not at the shops most days spending my money on food that's for the family when he is.

I've lost all sight of what's "fair" here. We could get one of those accounts where we both get a card but without it being an actual bank account that we could use for extra food shops but I know he'll end up spending it on crap and I'll be pissed off it's disappeared and I'll need to keep topping it up.

The financial split sounds fair to me. Tell him to stop buying wine and all the other rubbish when he goes to the shop. I’d even go as far as not eating or drinking anything he buys on these visits myself - it’s too much money to spend on chocolates/ sweets/ wine ( if he then has no money left).

Is the stuff he’s buying at the shops for the family or for him?

We have a joint account plus our personal accounts. All household expenses come out of the joint account. I do go to the shop about 4 times a week for various things. If it’s snacks for dc and friends after school, joint account. If it’s wine for me and a packet of sweets for dc, it comes out of my personal account.

We pay into joint account proportionately to our incomes. If I want to spend more, it’s from my own money. If it runs out, there’s no more personal spending unless it’s on something crucial for the household then obviously dh would send money over.

That said, I think you both need the power to buy something for the family at the shops. If it’s only you doing the weekly shop, does he not get to choose what to buy unless it comes out of personal money?

When we do our weekly shop, it comes from our joint account. Any other spending on food/etc comes either from our personal or joint account depending on the content. I’d be pretty annoyed if Dh did the weekly shop, counted it as ‘his contribution’ and I couldn’t add any of my own spends, which were joint to that because I ran and got them a different day.

I think it sounds like you need a household joint account that you can properly budget from. If Dh spends it inappropriately on wine and chocolate for himself then he’ll need to add more each month to keep it going. Rather than you sending him money like a child if he overspends, because it’s not ‘joint money’.

He does the weekly shopping list and I do the ordering. He doesn't add anything he wants onto it because he doesn't know what he fancies at the time.

The shop visits during the week are "treats" generally for all of us although none I've requested.

We definitely need to get better with the weekly shop. I've handed the weekly shopping list over to him because I've been working a lot lately. I ask him each week when I'm ordering whether he wants x, y or z but he always says no, he can pick something up if he wants it.