I like that this is even a question. My whole family is just silent when the bill comes and they stare at me, until I pay for the whole thing.

For something planned ahead like that, ideally the organizer would send a heads up “cost is $80 per person, I will put the bill on my CC and each family can reimburse me for their share + an extra $40 for mom and dad please, thanks”.

If not pre planned in that way, we’d just offer our fair share (so in your case $200). I can’t imagine anyone would expect you to split evenly - that would be crazy. My DH has 2 siblings who are single (the other 4 adult “kids” are married with 2-3 kids each). No one would ever expect the single siblings to split evenly with whole families of 4-5.

For smaller gatherings (whole family not there- maybe getting together with one or 2 siblings) usually we just take turns and/or split the bill evenly. We’d just pay for single sibs bc it is such a small share of the bill anyway.

Regardless of how many kids each has, we divide the bill evenly between all siblings. One pays, then sends divided amount to all of us. But we all can afford it. When money has been an issue in the past, we just don't send the amount to the money challenged sibling. Parents never know that all didn't contribute.

$200 in your scenario.

I would definitely say this would be per head and split the parents. . There’s no way I’d be subsidizing the other families. That’s nuts!

If I were your brother I’d pay for you.

There is no correct or normal way. You need to communicate with your siblings and propose how YOU think it should be divided to avoid confusion or unwelcome surprises. And if they have other ideas, then you've at least had the conversation about it ahead of time.

The correct thing for the others to suggest is for you to pay the $200. They should be insisting on it.

Talk to your sibling most likely to be coordinator, explain your situation and concerns and venmo them the agreed upon amount in advance.

In your situation , I would think one of your siblings would just cover you.

We only have one sibling. We are the higher earners and we just foot the entire bill.

If you were trying to be fair, I would do per head and split the parents. Definitely not four way split unless your siblings are real cheapskates.

Anonymous wrote:We’d just cover you. We aren’t nickel and diming a single parent.

Same. In my family, the older two typically cover everything. I'm not a single parent, but they are much wealthier than we are. I will pick up smaller thing sand gift their children generously.

Anonymous wrote:Everyone pays, per head, for their own families, then splits the parents 4 ways. Question is how much drinking or extras will be consumed? The heavy hitters should cover their own $$ habits.

DP
This gets too complicated. I would get embarrassed squabbling over who had what and drank more. I'd rather overpay than be at a table that did this in public. My siblings feel the same - we were raised too UMC for this.

We just had this scenario. I paid the entire bill and just shaved some off of the two single people that went. We all make decent money so no one was looking that closely.

Anonymous wrote:Just have one person pay and everyone chip in their respective amounts. Otherwise this is way too complicated given the disparate family sizes.

This.

Anonymous wrote:Divide the total bill by the # of people paying and each family pays proportional to their size

+1

My family has 3 adult children and a total of 7 grandchildren. We split evenly because it's just one additional 1/3 of a child's meal. OPs situation is a bit different so I would do as PP suggest or as other PP suggests 'here's $200 for our part'