Re: Husband and gifts
I don’t agree with the last part of your comment because I see sadaqa as a means to help those who are in need. There are definitely people more deserving of OP’s husband’s help, since some of these friends earn more than her husband does.
OP, I know exactly what you’re going through. My husband and I had a lot of arguments over this exact issue early on in our marriage. He has lived away from his family a lot and says his friends are like his family to him. He would go out of his way to help friends who rarely returned the favour. Like with you, none of them ever offered to help us move (my family was the one that ended up helping us with all that). My husband, on the other hand, drove almost 2 hours to go help his friend get his new apartment set up. He would also give them thousands of dollars in loans (and sometimes even as gifts) to deck out their rides, so then we sometimes had to postpone and/or cancel activites we wanted to do.
It took us a while to rach a resolution and was a very slow process. I had to keep explaining to him why we needed to save our money, but alhamdolillah he got it eventually; although to be perfectly honest, I think it was more the fact that his parents needed money that made him change. The way we resolved the gift situation is that now we keep an eye out for sales on stuff we might want to gift our friends. That way we’ll still be giving them something nice but not breaking the bank either.