Group gifts tend to get complicated when everyone involved has completely different financial situations and expectations.

This newly married couple carefully budgeted their money while finishing school and agreed to spend no more than $75 on a Christmas gift for the wife’s parents. The husband even made sure to clearly text the budget into the group chat before anyone bought anything.

Then Christmas arrived, and the gift somehow included an expensive gift card that pushed their share to more than double what they originally agreed to spend.

Things got even more frustrating when the husband tried addressing the lack of communication, and his in-laws immediately started complaining about him directly to his wife instead.

Read on to see how this whole thing played out.

AITA for calling out my brother and sister in-laws via text for going behind my back to my wife about me

I just got married this past summer, and my wife and her siblings usually pool together to buy gifts for their parents for birthdays, Christmas, anniversaries, etc.

My wife and I are on a very tight budget as we are very young and just finishing school (wife 23, me 25). We budgeted 80 dollars per month on gifts, as that is my wife’s love language.

This November, before Christmas, the text came in from brother-in-law Ray, 26M, and sister-in-law Katie, 28F. They were looking to go in on a group gift.

The gift was more than double their budgeted amount.

After talking to my wife, I texted the chat that we were in, but our budget was $75 dollars from my wife and me for this gift. This was our whole budget, but my wife always tells me her love language is giving gifts, so I agreed to do the whole budget for her parents, as we were going on a Christmas trip.

Nobody answered my text, and then Christmas rolls around, and out comes this gift, which is within the budget, and then, on top of that, a $250 gift card.

I thought surely this wasn’t within budget, but I didn’t think much of it. And I didn’t hear back about paying for this until Ray mentioned to my wife that we owe $180 for our part of the gift.

We paid this amount. Then, I sent another message to the group chat saying we were paying, but it was not right that we weren’t notified when it was going to be more than double. I also mentioned that we thought it wasn’t fair to blow through our boundary/budget of 80.

His wife’s parents are very wealthy.

Then Ray and Katie started messaging my wife about how insane it was that I was texting this and that I was ungrateful for how generous their parents were to us.

Their parents are very wealthy and generous.

They usually give out $500 gifts at Christmas/Birthdays per child but my issue is they blatantly went over without communicating.

It isn’t the end of the world, but I just want to be respected enough to be communicated with and replied to so we can choose if we want to be a part of it.

Now, he and his wife cannot agree on what to do.

Katie then finally responds with a message which was kindly worded but essentially dismissed my concern and implied we aren’t grateful for their parents generosity.

I then send a message back saying it has nothing to do with the generosity of the parents and everything to do with the financial constraints we are in. And that if Katie or Ray have any issues with me, they could call or message me directly not complain about me behind my back to my wife.

There has been no response to the message and I just saw Ray at a family event and he was acting super standoffish and wouldn’t look me in the eye.

I want to bring it up and get it settled but my wife just wants to sweep it under the rug and forget about it.

AITA?

Yikes! It sounds like the other couple really crossed a line here.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a dad who is using the credit card companies own envelopes against them.

Let’s see what the readers over at Reddit think about breaking the budget like this.

Here’s some advice.

For this person, he’s fine if he sorts it out with his wife.

According to this comment, handmade gifts are appropriate.

This person disagrees on one detail.

Ignoring someone’s budget and then acting offended when they bring it up would frustrate almost anyone.

The husband clearly communicated the spending limit ahead of time, and nobody bothered responding or warning him that the final cost would jump far beyond what he and his wife could comfortably afford.

And then, instead of discussing the issue directly with him afterward, his in-laws immediately started framing the situation as if he lacked gratitude for the parents’ generosity.

Wanting basic communication and respect around money hardly makes someone unreasonable.