Friends & money

Keeping score in friendships: why "I'll get the next one" goes wrong

By Team Cherry · September 8th 2026 · 4 minute read

We've all said it. Someone covers a shared cost, waves off being paid back right away, and adds the line that makes the moment feel settled: don't worry, I'll get the next one. It's a generous impulse, and for one afternoon it works fine. The trouble is that most groups don't stop at one afternoon. The habit becomes the whole system, and keeping score in friendships by memory alone is a shaky thing to build on.

It settles in wherever costs recur. Housemates fall into it around anything shared and ongoing. Friend groups fall into it across outings and get togethers. Nobody sits down and designs the system on purpose. It just accumulates, one covered cost at a time, until everyone is quietly relying on their own memory of who's ahead.

Why the tally never balances

Memory is the actual flaw here, and it isn't a character flaw in any one person. In a classic study, psychologists Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly asked married couples to separately estimate the share of household chores each partner handled: cleaning, planning, remembering what needed doing. Added together, the two partners' own estimates routinely summed to well over 100 percent.^[1] Each person could recall their own effort more easily than their partner's, so each one sincerely felt they were carrying more of the load than the numbers actually supported.

The same bias runs through an informal tab. Whoever covered the last thing remembers doing it clearly. Whoever's turn is next often genuinely doesn't feel like it's their turn, not because they're keeping score in bad faith, but because someone else's contribution is never as available in memory as your own. Two people can walk away from the exact same string of covered costs with two different, equally sincere, accounts of who's ahead.

The stakes are real enough that people notice when informal money between people who trust each other goes wrong. Bankrate surveyed adults who had lent cash to a friend or family member expecting to be paid back and found that 46 percent said the experience ended badly: 37 percent lost the money outright, and 21 percent said it damaged the relationship.^[2] "I'll get the next one" is a smaller, gentler version of the same arrangement, an informal debt resting on trust and memory instead of any record, and it inherits the same weak point.

What actually holds up

Write it down when it happens, not when someone asks

The moment a cost is covered is the easiest moment to record it and the hardest moment to want to. Nobody feels like pausing a good time to note who paid. But that's exactly the window where memory is still accurate for everyone, not just for the person who covered it. The habits that make that easy are in how to split costs with friends without ruining the friendship.

Keep each cost its own thing

Once several covered costs blur into a general sense of "I've been getting more of these lately," there's nothing specific left to check. A record where each cost stays separate turns a vague feeling into a fact either person can look at and agree on. It also takes the whole tally out of one person's head, which matters more than it sounds; see who keeps track of shared expenses.

Settle on a rhythm, not a feeling

Waiting for the tally to feel uneven before doing anything about it guarantees it stays invisible until it isn't. A light, regular check in, weekly, monthly, after a trip, catches the drift before either person has quietly decided they're owed something. If the check in itself feels awkward, how to ask roommates for money they owe you has wording that doesn't land as an accusation.

Where a shared ledger helps

This is close to the whole reason Have Another Cherry exists. Everyone in the group sees the same itemized list instead of relying on separate memories of who covered what. Each shared cost stays its own entry, so nothing gets rounded into a vague sense of who's ahead, and the record keeps track of how each cost was actually paid. Nobody has to be the one who remembers everything, because the list remembers it for everyone.

The takeaway

"I'll get the next one" is a kind thing to say. It just isn't a system, because it asks memory to do a job memory is genuinely bad at, and it asks that of everyone equally, which is exactly why the tally drifts quietly instead of loudly. A shared, itemized record does the one thing goodwill alone can't: it keeps the same tally in front of everyone looking at it.

Footnotes

1. Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric Biases in Availability and Attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(3), 322-336.
2. Bankrate. Survey: Nearly half of Americans who lend cash to loved ones face negative consequences.