I've been married for a couple of years. I own a car. I chose it, bought it outright, it is in my name and I have always paid all costs for tax, insurance etc with the exception of fuel. I normally need it to drive to work every day but my husband and I otherwise share it's use equally and I refer to it as 'our' car. I've been on mat leave for the past year and so my husband has used the car daily to drive to work (he moved jobs) and I've only used it a handful of times.
Originally, we'd planned to get a bigger, family friendly second car in a few years time. However as I need to go back to work and use the car again daily, we've had to expedite that. This car was going to be primarily used by my husband and will be in his name. This is also going to be the car used to take our son to and from nursery daily. DH found a car that he thought we should consider. £800,3 door, pretty old, >150k on clock. I nearly had kittens as I was worried about the safety of my son being in that car daily and that a 3 door car will be a pain fishing a child in and out. DH said that the only reason that he was considering such a small car was that we couldn't afford much more. His budget for a new car was £1500. I had saved up money for maternity leave and have been pretty frugal and so have savings left. I said I would match his contribution, giving us a budget of 3K. We were asking my parents for advise about cars and they were also worried about us getting an old banger and very generously they offered to contribute 7k to a new car and transferred the money to my account. This completely changed what we could afford, we decided to look at larger more family friendly cars and my husband chose the particular model that he thought we should go for. I've spent the past couple of weeks doing research and made a shorlist of cars that meet our requirements and will come in under budget including the initial outlay of tax and insurance. My husband vetoed everyone as too expensive. It turns out that he now only feels he can afford to contribute £100 to both buying and insuring the new car and that we should get something much cheaper and suggested using my parents contribution towards something else. I've put my foot down and said that I will return any money not spent on a car to my parents as that is why they gave it to us-he agreed. He now thinks that we should then only use the money that they given us to buy, insure and tax a new vehicle. The whole thing and his unwillingness to contribute has really made me uncomfortable. I feel quite close to returning my parents money and just leaving him to his own devices to buy the car he originally planned.