“Can we come together as a society and determine WHAT is proper venmo etiquette?? I feel like such an asshole for requesting funds even though my friend *said* they're willing to split the bill. Putting any amount of cents on the request feels like such a dick move. Can you just read the receipt for me and pay what you think is fair???”
Hello there!
Two things that definitely don’t mix are friends and money and Venmo has built its whole platform off of this dangerous combo.
Years ago I was pretty seriously dating this guy who would take me on nice dates. Think chic Japanese restaurant where we’d order a bottle of wine and multiple dishes. I’d wake up the next morning nourished and hungover and check my phone, hoping for a good morning text, only to find a Venmo request for half of the night before’s bill. He worked a full-time finance job and I was working part-time at a dance studio. This did not sit well with me.
It wasn’t the actual paying or the dollar amount that pissed me off, it was the fact that there was zero discussion of splitting the bill before the Venmo request came in. He’d pull out his credit card and I’d thank him and he would say your welcome. The first time it happened, he got lit up in my group chat for pulling such poor behavior. Venmo Etiquette Beyond Redemption. (Not to mention, I later found out he was not exclusively seeing me like I thought because I saw him sending requests to other girls for half the bill on nights we weren’t together).
This left a nasty fin-tech taste in my mouth. I’m not above using Venmo though. I use it quite often but I usually don’t use the request option. I don’t say that to be holier than thou but rather being someone who hates confrontation and would rather lose money.
At my last job, we would often order tacos together from the local taqueria and it became group etiquette between us to either hand over cash or pay your Venmo amount on the spot and if you forgot, the person who picked up the food would remind you before you left. If you owed $5.67, you’d pay $6. Always round up.
I understand this model doesn’t work for every group especially when the bill is bigger. But I think we gotta throw out the semantics when it comes to dealing with friends. What really matters to you about sharing a meal together?
To me, nice dinners out with friends are few and far between at the moment so what matters is sitting with my friends and sharing time with each other.
I’ve taken to splitting the bill down the middle. It doesn’t matter if one person ordered a more expensive dish or two drinks when you only got one. I’ll pay for half of your chocolate milkshake and you pay for half of my Gluten-free wrap and we’ll call it even. When you’re with close friends, it all evens out in the end.
If that doesn’t jive with you (which I understand!), ask for separate checks. Most all restaurants have a way of doing the math and figuring this out easily for you (if you’re a small group). I’m scarred by childhood memories of sitting bored at the dinner table well after we paid and my mom and all her siblings doing math on the back of receipts to see who owed what. But hey, everyone paid what they owed. Maybe the solution is to talk more openly about money at the table in the moment.
I think we can all agree that a Venmo request down to the cent is an absolute freak move. There just isn’t a need for that. And I say anything below $10, you take it on the chin and hit them with a “you buy the next round” and hold them to it.
And on the flip side, if you owe a friend money, pay it right away when they’re still in front of you. Don’t wait until you’re home or the next morning. We can take the burden of weirdness off of each other if we just treat it as if we were all handing each other cash. Don’t order something you can’t afford. And maybe don’t be like me circa 2016, agreeing to a whole bottle of wine when you can only afford a glass. You never know when the sneaky Venmo request will appear the next morning.
AND LASTLY, if you need to Venmo request someone, do it without shame. Just maybe mention it’s coming.
I’m almost to 200 subscribers! Share with your friends! I appreciate you all.
I’m trying to get to two posts a week!
Great points about money and friends. Most of the time it's not worth getting hung up on small dollars. And if it's big dollars and repeat non paying back offenders, maybe they aren't the best people to share a meal with!
Good, common sense advice.