My other passion is kayaking and canoeing. That can also get quite pricey. In that world I have a mate who has a ‘red’ policy. He only ever buys boats, paddles, PFDs, helmets, drysuits etc in red. Thus his wife cannot tell the difference between the new and the old and he easily slips new gear in when he wants. Genius.

My salary goes in joint ac, hers goes in hers, I do have a stash I portage money across to each month.
She never asks how much, good job really cos she’d have kittens 🙄

Loving all these tails of deceit.

glad I have a pair 🙂

the only slightly tricky issue was when the missus got her Blur LTc for a significant birthday present to herself. I was heading down the Alu version route last month until the a deal I couldn’t turn down arrived and we now have a matching pair. I asked if she minded…

I’m not deceitful, she doesn’t worry about it and never asks

i’ll waffle on about the tech specs and how the parts will revolutionise the ride for a good evening. After that, I’m not usually asked. I did get into trouble when i brought a tricross over, but she seemed to like it after trying it out… despite it being ”another bike in the flat”.

I feel like I am attending Bike Buyers Anonymous, anyway I will stand up and say.

“I have a secret slush fund in a UK account that my wife does not know about and it is used for bike purchases, however as she is not stupid and knows when I have made additions or simply replaced bikes altogether, I simply ensure that 20-25% of the cost of new purchase is paid for with one of our joint Credit Cards to keep some semblance or normality so I can lie about the true cost. I am helped in this by the devious bike shop owners who mercilessly pimp out new parts for me and assist me in this despite fully knowing I have a problem, all added and abetted by the bike industry in one general global conspiracy”.

One day she will realize that I am actually making a nice profit on renting out my UK house and will asked where the money is, but in the mean time I am enjoying my new XX1 drive train and Float X fork that I put on this month.

In my defense, what am I talking about there is no defense (though I do save 50% of my salary into a joint savings account every month).

I dont buy any bikes parts of value any more so its less of a problem. Generally anything the goes on it the garage is no questions asked providing her car is fixed and maintained.
Motorbikes tend to cause more complaints as does listing bikes on the house insurance.

Although I added up her last months Starbucks receipts last month and it was about £110. I have ‘gone on about it’ maybe a bit too much.

No I don’t if the wife asks I tell her, why would I lie?

How strange you all are – I’ve just this week dropped £1399 on a new bike and all she said was “can i have your Boardman then?”
Does help that it was money raised through selling some of my old reenactment kit but even so, its my money and i can spend it how i like.

Really need a new bathroom suite and a new stairs carpet but hey,ive 5 bikes 🙂

LBS phones and my wife answers, “Tell him his bike is ready and its cost????”.
Bike shop has now changed it policy on revealing cost over the phone!

She does occasionally ask how much stuff costs but not very often, at most I normally round stuff down slightly and always mention the RRP. Never drop the price by 50% like others mention.

I got a measure of her resignation to bike bits buying last year when I told her that a parcel was due to be delivered the following day, she asked what it was and I told here it was a cheap wheelset I bought on a huge discount from one of the German websites, she asked if they were just wheels or if there was also a frame attached!

Some great skills in this thread, we need a Kudos button !

I just run a standard Black ops fund, syphone money into an secret account to pay bills that dont really exist (like that 50k I owe my father, he used to owe his father and the legacy will continue with my son when he comes of age)

SOP’s
– Always keep the balance by leaving some receipts around for low value sale items
– Buy stuff from china then leave the delivery note out ( my recent 1K spend on carbon bits shows 50USD)
– If you do tell your other half the price always discount it by 50% then you never forget or get caught out when they ask you again in a few months (she still thinks 2.5K on a bike is ridiculous though)
– buy items in the same colour scheme to avoid detection (iv been wearing the sameSPD’s for 10years 😉

buy items in the same colour scheme to avoid detection

Not sure this works. In any case, there is always the ‘warranty replacement’

I’m single so I only have to justify to myself about spending money on bikes instead of my house.

My mate has to sneak about with prices with his wife though. He rang me a while ago and asked which 5:10 I had so I told him and it turned out he was stood in the LBS with his wife…….

Bad move as she was mooching around looking at stuff as he was trying these 5:10 on. He managed to blag £30 off them so played the safety card with her and all was fine. I’ve since been with them bike shopping but we went to a Jumble and got loads of discounts so she always says ” take Simmy with you, he never pays full price “

This was fine till he wanted a quote for a new stairs carpet. Turns out the carpet guy is a mountain biker and walked In, saw my mates bike and said ” Christ some money’s worth there, them pedals are not cheap, look at them forks….” Hence him been very quickly usher forcefully up the stairs to do what he there for and not incite a divorce.

So think first guys, before letting anyone in your house, mention you ride bikes and see there reaction 😀

http://www.relate.org.uk/home/index.html

might be worth trying for some of you.

One day she will realize that I am actually making a nice profit on renting out my UK house and will asked where the money is, but in the mean time I am enjoying my new XX1 drive train and Float X fork that I put on this month.

Quality.
I read on here once that a chap had a bike shop print out a “Congratulations, you’ve won our competition” certificate for his new Orange 5 😀

I read on here once that a chap had a bike shop print out a “Congratulations, you’ve won our competition” certificate for his new Orange 5

brant certainly did it with an inbred.

Separate finances here. We live together, but are not married, no kids.

I don’t do joint finances. My OH earns his salary, he works hard for it, so as far as I’m concerned once the rent, bills and essentials are paid for, then that money is his, and the same for me. We are adults and we trust each other to pay our share of the essential costs each month, and that any “leisure spending” will not impact on those always being paid.

If anyone decided to try and tell me off for spending money that I earned from working on something that I wanted to buy, they would be given very short shrift indeed.

Spending other people’s money or getting into debt doing it is another matter, but if it’s your money and you earned it, fair game I say.

I think somethings ate quite hard to justify to an other half who doesn’t ride…we kind of accept that £1,500 for a frame is OK (well, its not but that’s what we still pay) but if you dint like bikes I can see how that could be construed as madness. Hence why she’s never been told how much the Rune costs; it’s not a lie u guess.

I did tell her how much my Reverb was and that raised an eyebrow but I played the discount card.

Interestingly she’s less bothered when new stuff for her bike turns up!

I don’t do joint finances. My OH earns his salary, he works hard for it, so as far as I’m concerned once the rent, bills and essentials are paid for, then that money is his, and the same for me. We are adults and we trust each other to pay our share of the essential costs each month, and that any “leisure spending” will not impact on those always being paid.

If anyone decided to try and tell me off for spending money that I earned from working on something that I wanted to buy, they would be given very short shrift indeed.

Spending other people’s money or getting into debt doing it is another matter, but if it’s your money and you earned it, fair game I say.

I’ve said it above but to reiterate, we started like that but ended up with the same fixed amount left each. Mrs C and I earn different amounts (me £15K more that her) but when you take into account the extra houshold stuff she does we work equally hard (we both work full time, just her full time is 37.5hrs pw and mine quite a lot more). If we had stuck to the original model on salary alone she could not afford half the amount we put into the “house” and would have zero toy money and I’d be rolling in it. To be honest when we first ‘grew up’ a bit and switched to what we do now it stung a bit as my personal spending was slashed massively but I got used to it in the end. I’ve got a friend who works daft hard but his wife does not – grown up kids and as far as I can tell she dosn’t seem to do an awful lot with her time apart from go out to spend the money he is out earning. Not sure I could square that in my head…..or he was a very naughty boy in the past and this is penance!

Those people who hide their purchasing and operate joint finances – I can see how you hide the physical purchase – sneak it into the shed, keep to the same colour etc etc. But how to you hide the paper trail – does she (or he sometimes) not look at the credit card and bank statement ever? Do you operate an old skool attitude of finance is ‘man’s stuff’ kind of household? Even if I wanted to I can’t see a £2K CRC debit not going noticed! Or do you syphon some of it off at source (pay)?

Separate finances here. We live together, but are not married, no kids.

I don’t do joint finances. My OH earns his salary, he works hard for it, so as far as I’m concerned once the rent, bills and essentials are paid for, then that money is his, and the same for me. We are adults and we trust each other to pay our share of the essential costs each month, and that any “leisure spending” will not impact on those always being paid.

If anyone decided to try and tell me off for spending money that I earned from working on something that I wanted to buy, they would be given very short shrift indeed.

Spending other people’s money or getting into debt doing it is another matter, but if it’s your money and you earned it, fair game I say

My position exactly. MsD earns a bit more than i do but neither of us earns what most would call a ‘good’ wage. I pay my mortgage and she owns and pays for her car. We have a joint bills account and thats it.
If/when we go away etc we pay equally, sometimes i’ll buy a meal in the cafe and she’ll buy the drinks in the pub etc.
No need to hide our expenditure and if we want something we buy it – if we can afford it. No credit here.
Mind you, many would say my priorities are skewed, my house is in need of some redecoration but i spend it on bikes!
Thing is, i do have the cash for the house (just spent £5.5K on the outside) but i can’t face the disruption of having the bathroom ripped out so ignore the problem instead! 😳

My wife could always tell when it was a slow week at work as the postman would bring all sorts of goodies. Not really the case anymore as I have very little disposable income…

I earn about £4k more a year than OH, but I put more into savings, for things like car repairs, one off expenses etc, and I also pay more towards the cost of the car, since I use it more.

It all comes down to trusting each other to act like sensible adults where money is concerned really, if it came to car insurance renewal time and I’ve got no money in the savings account because I spunked it on bike bits, then OH would have a right to be annoyed, because it would cost us both more to pay monthly and I think our “laissez faire” attitude to each other’s finances wouldn’t work if that trust wasn’t there.

We also don’t own a house, and we don’t have kids. Maybe the model we chose would be different if either/both of those were the case, particularly if one of us was staying home or working p/t to raise children and that entailed a significant drop in earnings. I do know women whose husbands/partners control the finances entirely, they earn far more, and do as they please with their money, and the women end up with very little of their own, usually footing the bill for all the childcare as well. Makes me shudder.

I’m single so I dont have any of these problems but it all seems a bit ridiculous. Why would you need to lie about such things?

if you are ever fortunate enough to have a spouse, you will learn.

All this imaginative hiding of cost must take a lot of time and memory to handle. When I last bought a bike it was a case of pointing out it cost less annually than her golf club and that as she got a lot of pleasure from that I presumed she’d be pleased I had something equivalent to enjoy.

I helped her out with something earlier this year to which her reaction was “thanks – I guess you’ve earned a new bike for that”. That’s banked…

I do know women whose husbands/partners control the finances entirely, they earn far more, and do as they please with their money, and the women end up with very little of their own

I suspect quite a few of those who ‘lie’ above operate a bit like this. The lying is because whilst they feel entitled (they feel they earnt it) they also feel guilty because the balance between what each partner gets to spend it skewed. Which might be better than those that just go out and spunk all the household money and don’t gaf!

I’m not sure I understand this. As a couple/family you can either afford these bikes/parts – in which case you buy them, or you can’t – in which case you don’t. Judging by some of the responses above it would appear that many of you lack this fairly basic understanding of economics, usually gained after leaving the parental home, and have somehow managed to marry your mothers.

I bought some forks the other week, they got delivered to parents (as account automatically goes there), thought I’d swap them at workshop, job done, she’d never know, but, invoice dropped on the floor and she wasn’t impressed with the £24o, cheap I thought!

I’m definitely not telling her about new front wheel & bars…..

Sometimes ignorance is easier, we’re not married & don’t have a joint account, so it’s still ‘my’ money, for now………

I assume that those of you who cover up spends also take precautions to avoid your other halves looking at your post history?! My G/F likes forums a lot, and seeing as we both use each-other’s lappy386’s she’s bound to open her/my machine and find it on the post history page. If she saw I’d commented on a “Lying to the wife about the cost of bike parts” page 100% certain she’d read it.

Clearly, in this case I’ll be OK – but some of you, surely you’d be beaten to death with your own newly-purchased “£50” Bombers?

Both people in a relationship can have a different attitude towards money and that can be very difficult to change. Obviously that goes back to how you were brought up and values instilled by parents.

Who’s to say that those values are right?

I used to hide frames and forks in my wardrobe. The ex thought that one should live a frugal existence when that was not necessary due to a reasonable income. Anything bought was considered self-indulgent.

There’s no reasoning with someone like that!

if you are ever fortunate enough to have a spouse, you will learn.

I’m fortunate to have a spouse, and have never lied about the cost of bike parts. The lengths people will go to to deceive their wife are really quite staggering.

if your wife doesn’t care about your bike spend, it’s because she spends more on some equivalent frippery or she’s having an affair.
you mark my words.

if your wife doesn’t care about your bike spend, it’s because she spends more on some equivalent frippery or she’s having an affair.
you mark my words.

🙂
Or she trusts that I wouldn’t spend money that isn’t spare disposable income. Because I don’t.

As a mate of mine once said, “Worst case scenario, she’ll leave me. I’ll be upset for a few days, but you just get on with it after that, don’t you?”

Many a true word, etc.

As a couple/family you can either afford these bikes/parts – in which case you buy them, or you can’t – in which case you don’t. Judging by some of the responses above it would appear that many of you lack this fairly basic understanding of economics, usually gained after leaving the parental home, and have somehow managed to marry your mothers.

This. I want to be in a relationship with a responsible, independent adult. A parent/child dynamic in a relationship is not healthy IMO.
I don’t understand why anyone would need to lie about a purchase, if:

a) you earned the money and it’s yours
b) your purchase will not leave your partner or someone else unfairly burdened with the cost of things that you/the family need (note: need, not necessarily just want)
c) you are not in lots of debt and do not have a history of irresponsible spending

I was with a guy for a while who fell into the b and c category and still used to chuck loads of money on tat for his kid that she didn’t need, would use once and then would lie discarded on the bedroom floor. When I discovered the extent of his debt and financial stupidity, I was out of there pretty quick. I am not picking up the tab for someone not having learned basic economics, nor am I up for having to be someone’s mother rather than their partner.

I don’t think the issue is whether you as a couple can afford the stuff but your attitude to what the money is spent on. My wife and I were both brought up in fairly hard up families but it has had a different effect on us. I think stuff it I’ll be dead a long time, enjoy it now. She thinks oh dear what if?????? The end result will be that the kids who are lazy useless items will get the benefit of our hard work. They’ll get the house, we ought to be spending what money we have got on enjoying ourselves and buying and using bike bits is one way I enjoy myself.

The ex thought that one should live a frugal existence when that was not necessary due to a reasonable income. Anything bought was considered self-indulgent.

My OH’s parents are like that. Thankfully he isn’t. He is very responsible with money, and has a horror of debt, thanks to having grown up with frugal parents I guess, but he knows how to enjoy himself as well.

I couldn’t live with a total spendthrift (hence me having got rid of aforementioned ex) but I couldn’t live with someone who was that tight either.

Simpler just to get an other half who spends as much as you do on kit.

It’s hard for herself to complain about me buying a new tri bike when she’s just picked up a new Juliana!

Cheaper for us sharing tools, race wheelsets and all the other crap that goes with! Plus all the bike you want in the flat!

Living the dream! 😀