BIL put us in very awkward situation with birthday meal!

mishkanorman

So its £90 for food you wont even like !?!?!

It would be a family feud im afraid, or I'd spend the whole night mentally calculating how much each disgusting mouthful was costing me !

notisis

Something similar happened to us some years back. OH wanted to go and said yes. I said we could only afford for one of us to attend. He agreed at the time and then threw a strop on the day that I wasn't attending. I said if he could pay for me and transport back which was going to cost at least £50 just for my transport as he'd agreed to stay over when I needed to be back at work that was fine. Needless to say he couldn't and didn't see why we couldn't - we were in debt and I wasn't prepared to borrow even more on a card especially since I was the only one working. Eventually his strop meant he didn't go either. OK a miserable weekend and it upset his parents but at least we weren't in more debt!

By the way he has now come around to my way of thinking and is pretty careful with money and getting value for it!

Steel_2

I have had a similar situation to the OP's in the past and been up front about it.

Simply said that we couldn't attend a meal at the moment as due to our finances, but as the meal was in an up-market pub that we would pop by for a drink later after the meal was finished to wish them a happy birthday.

To be honest, a complicating factor was it was a close family member's birthday and they had once again only told us about this meal a day or so in advance and expected us to attend without giving any thought to our possible plans or finances.

So us not going for the meal was as much to protect our meagre finances at the time as it was to teach our family member not to spring expensive outings on us like that. No matter how many times they are told they still wait until the last minute, often the day before something, before letting people know with the presumption they'll have nothing else planned or will cancel to turn up.

I had to receive an irritating lecture from some school marm that had been invited about how we'd have been able to come if we had changed Tesco vouchers into meal deals, but I told her we use them to buy more important basic things, like food, not luxuries like meals out.

That shut her up.

Derivative

"Family feud"?
What is this nonsense, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding?

To the posters saying £45 is not all that much for a three course meal -

You are either well off, or extremely bad at budgeting.
If we're talking analogies, £45 is almost an entire weeks' worth of JSA.

jackieb

I don't understand why you're being invited out for a meal to celebrate your sister-in-laws birthday and you're having to pay for it. I think it's a bit cheeky. A bit like getting invited to a wedding and then getting a bill for the meal afterwards. If they want to celebrate, they should pay. Now if it was you who suggested taking her out for a meal for her birthday then she shouldn't have to pay.

If your BIL can't afford to pay for everyone's meals then he should just have went out for a quiet meal on their own. Everyone else could've arranged something in someone's house for her, and everybody could've brought in something to contribute towards it - be it food or drink.

jackieb

If I was your sister-in-law i'd be very embarrassed at the thought of everyone having to fork out so much money for my birthday. Does she know the meal's been organised?

Just re-read the OP and have seen it's a surprise. What are the odds she's going to be mortified when she realises?

Bexm

Ok, well we went.. BIL paid £10 towards each of our meals, so we ended up paying £35 each and drinks were bought by MIL. (Wouldn't take a no)
Her friends (all SIL's work mates who we'd never met) had all told him to book the place and he'd gone with majority, which I suppose is fair enough, and he'd been getting so stressed trying to arrange it all in secret he'd forgotten to tell the family some of the details in advance!

Granted it was a lovely place, posh beyond belief.
The food, surprisingly was very nice, but the portions so small they left me considering a McDs afterwards
It was posh food, like 1 carrot and a tiny piece of meat kinda thing.

So.. still not too impressed with paying that amount for such a tiny meal, but it only ended up being £25 over what we had budgeted so not so bad. It was a new experience as we'd never eaten anywhere like that before and it was quite a nice night!
SIL loved it.

So... lessons learned are:
Make sure we know exactly what's happening in advance next time.
Don't assume!

Thanks all for your comments

poet123

Derivative wrote: »

"Family feud"?
What is this nonsense, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding?

To the posters saying £45 is not all that much for a three course meal -

You are either well off, or extremely bad at budgeting.
If we're talking analogies, £45 is almost an entire weeks' worth of JSA.

As has been said, the ingredients for meal are only one part of it. You are paying for those, staff, premises, and mark up. So, not comparable with JSA which is for a very basic standard of living.

Person_one

poet123 wrote: »

As has been said, the ingredients for meal are only one part of it. You are paying for those, staff, premises, and mark up. So, not comparable with JSA which is for a very basic standard of living.

Well done, you completely missed the point.

poet123

Person_one wrote: »

Well done, you completely missed the point.

No, I didn't my point was you can't make that comparision as the OP is not on JSA so in this instance it is not relevant. It may be relevant to some but not to this post in particular, get it now?