Coming up with a gift for a friend can be hard, especially if you are on a budget. Sometimes, it is much better to pool your money with a larger friend group, so you can get one thing that is actually really good.

That was the situation that the group of friends in this story was in. So, one person offered to collect a small amount of money from each person and purchase a gift on behalf of them all.

Everyone agreed and pitched in, but when he bought a gift and a gift card with the money, a few of them got upset that he got the gift card rather than just returning the left over money to each person.

Personally, I don’t see that he did anything wrong. Read through the full story and see what you think.

AITA for spending all €210 on a gift?

I’m a senior in high school, and a friend of mine recently turned 20 and was throwing a party.

They are very organized.

For the first time, I created a social media group (WhatsApp) with all the guests, made up of her friends and us classmates, to discuss the gift.

First, I ran a survey to ask how many would participate, then I posted the proposed alternatives: earrings, a Tezenis gift card, and a Sephora gift card.

This sounds like a great idea.

Since both the gift card and the earrings were receiving good votes, even though the earrings were winning, I suggested that, depending on the price of the earrings, we could also offer a gift card to bundle.

Those who responded (since most of them viewed but didn’t respond) said it was fine. (It should be noted that people didn’t vote in the surveys, so I had to message some of them privately to see if they’d participate.)

 

In the end, I suggested we each contribute €10, and if there were any leftovers, we could give them a gift card or something else—if the others agreed, of course.

They started sending me money without responding but visually, so I figured they’d say so if they disagreed.

Everything seemed to be going to well.

After collecting all the money (€210), a titanic undertaking because I had to push some people who kept procrastinating, I gave the gifts and sent the receipts.

The first thing I got were the earrings, €120, the second the gift card, €90 (writing on the group if it was okay to use them only for the card, I waited a few minutes but I had already received some affirmative replies from the birthday girl’s friends and others who had viewed without responding, so I continued).

Why would he give the money back?

Once everything was finished, a classmate of mine wrote on the group saying in a rather patronizing tone that I could redistribute the remaining €90 instead of spending it.

I replied by forwarding the message from the night before in which I had said that I would use the €10 for the earrings and the card, he said in a joking tone, but not too much, he seemed more annoyed, that he wanted a bank transfer.

Well, nobody is strictly obligated to give exactly €10.

I didn’t reply. Incidentally, I would like to point out that in class two boys had sent me €9.67 instead of €10 because it was “fun”, saying that anyway they weren’t precise because I only had to buy the earrings.

I replied that in reality I had also written that I would keep it to €10 to also add something to the gift, but they had already started laughing among themselves, so they probably didn’t even listen to me.

No, of course not.

So, was I wrong not to insist and emphasize even more that I would use all the money?

AITA?

Some people just love to complain. If anything, those friends should be thankful that this person took on the task of organizing everything and actually making the purchase.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a sister who canceled a family dinner after realizing she’d been the only one putting in effort for years.

Check out what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

People always make things too difficult.

He did everything right.

He communicated more than enough.

Let the birthday girl know that some of her friends are cheap.

People make it so hard to help.

It is people like this that make it difficult to organize gift giving. They agreed to (or ignored) what he suggested, therefore they were in on it. He has no obligation to double check every little detail.

I would ignore any further complaints that they make, and I would certainly not be the one who organizes things for this group in the future.