I am very confused by “Family Purchase Sharing.”

The payment system is a bit more nuanced that an earlier post would lead you to believe.

Based on: https://support.apple.com/108774 and https://support.apple.com/HT201359

1. If anybody in the family buys or subscribes to something, Apple first attempts to charge the item to that individual's Apple Account (Apple ID) balance, if any.

2. If a family member does not have enough personal Apple Account balance, any excess will be charged to the Family Organizer's primary payment method (usually a card of some kind). The Organizer's personal balance will not be used for purchases made by other family members. If Apple cannot bill the primary payment method, the Organizer will need to make another payment method the primary method. With Family Sharing the Organizer always has to have at least one functioning payment method.

Also note: "Some purchases, including gifts, can't be billed to Apple ID balance and will be charged to the family organizer's payment method." "Some subscriptions might not be charged to Apple ID balance."

Ref:

- Family purchases and payments - https://support.apple.com/108774

- How apps, content, and subscriptions from Apple are billed - https://support.apple.com/HT201359

- Check your Apple ID balance - https://support.apple.com/HT202359

- Add a payment method to your Apple ID - https://support.apple.com/HT201266

Adding funds to your Apple ID balance:

- https://support.apple.com/HT201209

- https://support.apple.com/HT208687

From: https://support.apple.com/HT212253

"If you're the family organizer and you don't want to pay for family members' purchases and subscriptions, you can turn off Purchase Sharing [ https://support.apple.com/108774 ]. When Purchase Sharing is turned off, everyone must use their own payment method. When Purchase Sharing is turned off, family members can share subscriptions, but they can't share individual purchases like apps or books." <-- I presume that means movies also cannot be shared unless they are part of an AppleTV program.

Yes. Purchase sharing requires the organizer to pay for all purchases. You can disable and still share subscriptions to Apple TV, music, etc. Just not purchases.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108774

kitkaticus wrote:

Thanks for the clarification!

While the statement: "Purchase sharing requires the organizer to pay for all purchases" is not strictly accurate, if you are the Family Sharing Organizer it does leave you open to paying for another person's purchases if they do not have adequate account balance to pay for an item. You would just have to have well-behaved siblings who took care to ensure they had adequate account balance and paid you back promptly should a charge appear.

So, if you want to share purchases but also make absolutely sure that you would never end up seeing a charge for something another person buys then Apple's system is probably not the best for you.

No, but if your sibling buys something that can't be bought with personal balance and it gets charged to your card then they will come to you with the money to pay you back.

It strikes me as highly likely this is the best system Apple can devise to ensure that a "family" group remains a group of trusting individuals, or ones where the organizer has control over others, and not just any group of 6 people who met on an Internet chat group and want to find a way to save some money. It's quite clever actually. Incidentally, before this system was devised there was no sharing of content at all. You each had to buy the movie individually. People used to complain that a family could buy a single CD and share it among the family members and why did they have to each buy individual copies online? So Apple responded with Family Sharing and has designed it so it makes families happy and also the media rights owners happy since it was basically how things had been done back in the CD/LP days.

We started family sharing with my daughter having Apple Music subscription I had extra I cloud storage as soon as we all joined family sharing they started billing both of us for music. It’s still listed under her Apple ID and it’s not listed under my llisted paid subscriptions but is withdrawn from my bank account monthly. Tried calling Goldman Sachs because there are multiple errors with my Apple Card but there systems is messed up and they hung up on me 8 times

sherylfromil:

Makes perfect sense. She has the subscription but you, as the Organizer, get charged for her subscription since she does not have personal account balance to pay for it. If you want to see the subscription on your account then you need to subscribe and then have her unsubscribe (make sure you do it in that order or else you will lose your playlists).

This has nothing to do with Goldman Sachs or Apple Card.