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The awkward math of paying family back after the holidays
There’s a group chat on my phone called “Mom & Dad gift $$” that has been pinned since the first week of December. It was supposed to be temporary. It’s now January 11th, and the last message in it is my brother Danny saying “ok so who owes who” followed by absolutely nobody answering.
This happens every year in my family, and I’m pretty sure it happens in a lot of families. The holidays run on goodwill and credit cards. Everybody grabs whatever needs grabbing in the moment, and nobody keeps receipts in any organized way. Then January shows up like the bill at the end of a long dinner where nobody was watching the drinks.
Here’s roughly how our December went. My sister Carla hosted Christmas at her place in Columbus, which meant she did the grocery runs, including the one on the 23rd that she described as “a war zone with a Starbucks.” Danny put our parents’ gift on his card, a fancy espresso machine that cost about $600 and that Dad has since used to make exactly one latte. I booked Mom’s flight from Tucson because I had a fare alert set up and the price dipped for about four hours. Somewhere in there, Carla also bought the wrapping paper and Danny paid for a pizza night when the oven died.
None of us were trying to keep score. That’s kind of the problem.
Is hosting a cost or a gift?
This was the part that got a little tense. Carla’s position, at first, was that hosting was her thing and she didn’t want anyone paying her back. Danny’s position was that she’d spent a few hundred dollars on food that all of us ate, and it felt wrong not to chip in. I think both of them were right, honestly, which is the worst kind of disagreement to be stuck in the middle of.
Where we landed was a split. We all chipped in on the groceries, but not on stuff like her electric bill or the new bath towels she insisted she was going to buy anyway. Hosting itself (all the cleaning, plus giving up her bedroom to our parents for a week) stayed a gift. That felt fair, and more importantly, it let Carla feel thanked instead of reimbursed. Those aren’t the same thing, and I don’t think we’d have figured that out if Danny hadn’t pushed a little.
One person should do the math
The real breakthrough was boring. One person sat down and added it all up. Before that, we were each trying to calculate it separately in our heads, and I’m fairly sure all three of us came up with different numbers that conveniently favored ourselves by a few dollars.
Carla ended up being that person, mostly because she’s the organized one and partly because she’d been logging things in OweMate as they happened, so she had a running balance for me and another one for Danny instead of a shoebox of receipts. She texted us the totals, and the whole conversation that had been stalled for a month got settled in about fifteen minutes.
The other thing that helped was netting it out. Instead of everybody sending everybody money (I owe Danny for the gift, Danny owes me for the flight, and on and on), we figured out the final difference and made it as few transfers as possible. In our case, Danny and I each sent Carla one payment, and Danny and I called it even between us after some light bickering over a $12 difference. It’s like those circular IOUs where everyone owes a friend a pizza and the pizzas just cancel out.
Stuff I’d tell my December self
I think the biggest lesson is that talking about it before the holidays is way easier than talking about it after. Back in November, when everybody’s feeling generous and nobody’s spent anything yet, it’s easy to say “let’s split the gift for Mom and Dad evenly, and whoever hosts gets grocery money.” In January, with the credit card statements arriving, that same sentence somehow sounds like an accusation.
I’d also say don’t count everything. Mom brought two pies. Dad drove everybody around in his truck. Nobody’s sending them a Venmo request for gas money, and if they did, I’d assume someone had been replaced by a robot. Family math works better with some rounding and a little generosity built in. If you’re within $15 of each other, you’re probably even.
And it helps to keep the tone about logistics instead of character. Nobody did anything wrong by forgetting to pay someone back over the holidays. Everyone was busy. Treating it like a spreadsheet problem and not a who’s-the-cheapest-sibling problem kept us from turning a $600 espresso machine into a grudge.
Last thing, and this one’s more of a feeling than a rule: money between siblings carries a lot of old baggage. Who was the responsible one growing up, who always borrowed the car and returned it on empty. You’d be surprised how quickly a $40 grocery split can drag that stuff into the room. Keeping it light and fast is probably the best defense.
The group chat is unpinned now. Danny’s last message in it says “we’re square, nobody bring this up at Easter,” and I’ve never agreed with him more.
The OweMate blog is written by the people who make OweMate, a simple way to keep track of money between friends and family.