Gifts out of income - married couple separate accounts

[Strasbourg1955]

For demonstrating gifts out of surplus income, I believe it's expected that household expenses will be split equally between husband and wife. That's easy for major items such as energy, Council Tax and car insurance. But we pay randomly for food shopping, meals out, petrol etc. It depends who goes to the supermarket. We don't have a joint bank account or credit card. Do we have to go through our statements and work out which was a shared purchase (e.g. supermarket) and which was an individual purchase (e.g. haircut)? That's a nightmare! It's much easier to work out our annual expenditure by each totalling our current account and credit card statements for the year, then just adjusting for the big household bills. Advice welcome.

[AGoodman]

The law is silent on the detail and I don't think there is any guidance covering this. Dividing the costs between you would seem to be a sensible approach.

Ideally you would leave some leeway anyway so the exact numbers don't matter.