Do a search for anything resembling “Paying for my own purchases in Apple family sharing” or “How to use my own credit card for app store purchases as a family sharing member?” and you are likely to get discouraged; the vast majority of sites, including Apple’s own, say that basically you can’t do it. Or they tell you that you can, but you need an Apple gift card to do it. Neither of these are accurate. You can pay for your own purchases, using your own credit card or debit card, even when you are on someone else’s Apple Family Sharing plan, you just need to know how to do it, and it just takes a little bit of pre-planning.

It’s a story old as time – David and Goliath, Taylor Swift and Apple. Only the slingshot that Swift used was the withholding of her music from Apple Music, Apple’s new streaming music internet radio service (as contrasted to iTunes). Here’s what’s going on and what was in her love letter to Apple.

The netosphere is a’buzz with the announcement of Apple’s new cloud-based streaming music service. The Apple music service is actually part of a cloudy storage service called iCloud (what else?). iCloud is an online storage and “syncing” service which allows you to “sync” calendars, contacts, email, photos, documents, ebooks, and yes, your music, across multiple devices. The music part of it basically allows you to store your iTunes library in ‘the cloud’ and access it from any capable device. (We put “sync” in quotes because technically it’s not really syncing, it’s having your data “pushed” and downloaded to each of your devices, on demand, but many users still think of it as syncing.)