Stop Spending My Money, Mom

Wednes­day evening, while The Son was busy­ing play­ing his cello in orches­tra rehearsal, I ran a cou­ple of errands.  The hard­wood floor store didn’t have what I was look­ing for and I still had about 45 min­utes to kill so I stopped in the Mar­shalls down the street.  I needed to return that pair of “swish” pants.  Hav­ing plenty of time left and no read­ing mate­r­ial with me, I decided to kill the rest of the hour look­ing around the store.  I ended up find­ing a nice $54 Lanz of Salzburg flan­nel night­gown for $16.99 that I thought The Daugh­ter would like.  And she did — like it, that is.

But as I entered the pur­chase into my YNAB bud­get that night, it occurred to me that I’d just spent The Daughter’s money.  We’ve been work­ing up to her hav­ing a set monthly cloth­ing allowance but now the YNAB Pro­gram* makes it really easy to keep track of exactly what I spend on her clothes and exactly how much she has left in her allowance at any given point.  So after enter­ing the pur­chase in the reg­is­ter, I clicked on the “Bud­get” tab and saw that her cloth­ing allowance had just decreased by $18.36.

It struck me that I had just spent her money and that we had a poten­tial prob­lem here.

The rea­sons for giv­ing The Daugh­ter a monthly cloth­ing allowance are 1) to demon­strate to her how quickly expenses such as clothes, shoes, bras, undies, sports­wear, ect add up; and 2) to help her learn to live within a lim­ited bud­get and make the cor­re­spond­ing nec­es­sary deci­sions now, while she’s still at home, rather than later when she’s on her own.

So as I entered the expense and saw her bud­geted allowance drop, I real­ized that I’d have to make a few changes to my own shop­ping habits.  In truth, I don’t shop for The Daugh­ter very much.  She’s a pretty typ­i­cal 15-yo girl — she thinks my taste sucks, she likes to choose her own clothes, and I’ve taught her from early on to always try some­thing on before buy­ing.  The night­gown pur­chase was a whim.  I knew she could use another night­gown, I thought she’d like the pat­tern, and, well, just because.  [Note to self:  work on this impulse shop­ping thing. ]

Wednes­day night, while tuck­ing her in to bed and say­ing “good night”, I men­tioned that I’d spent her money and that she needed to decide whether that was money she really wanted to spend and whether the night­gown was what she really wanted to spend it on.  With school and sports and life-in-general, we didn’t return to the issue until this morning.

Yes­ter­day, The Daugh­ter went window-shopping at the mall with her schoolmates/teammates/friends and ended up find­ing a $50 pair of Amer­i­can Eagle jeans she wants.  Hav­ing no money on her at the time and know­ing that such a big pur­chase should be care­fully con­sid­ered first, she put them on hold as I’ve taught her to do.  Her plan was to ask for the jeans for Christ­mas.  I said “no” to Christ­mas — I’ve already decided what the kids are get­ting and a pair of jeans isn’t on the list.  “But,” I said, “you can take them out of your cloth­ing allowance.”  Hmm.

Now some peo­ple would freak at spend­ing $50 on a pair of jeans, myself included.  But I know that that’s actu­ally a pretty aver­age price for a pair of “designer”-type jeans.  I don’t like spend­ing money on clothes but I sure can appre­ci­ate that some brands fit bet­ter than oth­ers.  I per­son­ally see no point in pay­ing $15 for a pair of generic jeans that don’t fit well and one doesn’t enjoy wear­ing.  I also know, from expe­ri­ence, that AE jeans do con­sis­tently fit The Daugh­ter well and that she gets her money’s worth out of the two pair she cur­rently owns.  So I agreed to take The Daugh­ter back to the mall today to pur­chase the jeans.

This talk of jeans and cloth­ing bud­get brought up the topic of the night­gown.  It also brought up the fact that cur­rently her “allowance” is com­pletely arbi­trary.  I’ve been assign­ing that bud­get cat­e­gory $100 each month for the past three bud­get­ing peri­ods (months) but I have no idea, really, of how much I think she should get.

One hun­dred dol­lars a month seems like an out­ra­geously large amount of money.  But if you add up what we’ve spent to clothe her over the past few years, I sus­pect that $100 is pretty close to what we aver­age every month.  She’s 15, after all.  Tastes and pre­ferred brands aside, the past few years have been a com­pli­cated period for her.  She’s grown.  And devel­oped.  And her style pref­er­ences have matured and gone through sev­eral changes.  In addi­tion, she started attend­ing school full-time, stopped swim­ming com­pet­i­tively, and joined two new sports.  So between bas­ket­ball shoes and cross-training shoes, track pants and vol­ley­ball socks, sports bras and ankle braces, the dreaded “muffin-top” induced cup-upsizing and a change in under­wear pref­er­ences, normal-growth– and weight-gain-caused out­grow­ing of pants and shirts, dressy-clothes and acces­sory require­ments on game-days — all of this really adds up but I had no idea of how much it all added up to.  So I assigned a very arbi­trary and most-likely gen­er­ous $100 per month.

Now that her growth has slowed or maybe even fin­ished and her weight sta­bi­lized, one would hope that the influx of new clothes would slow down. But, at this point I’m going to stick to that bud­get allowance — while also inform­ing The Daugh­ter that it might be low­ered if deemed pru­dent by the parental units.   And I’m going to stop spend­ing her money.  Every sin­gle cloth­ing and acces­sory pur­chase for The Daugh­ter — except gift pur­chases — will come out of that bud­geted allowance.

Oh, and the night­gown?  It’s going back to Mar­shalls and when the return is done the funds will be returned to The Daughter’s bud­geted allowance.  And not because she has decided that a new night­gown is low on her pri­or­ity list but because, after try­ing it on, she doesn’t love the fit and doesn’t think she’d wear it much.  I com­pletely agree and fully sup­port her deci­sion.  That will teach me to spend her money!

Related posts:

1. Day 121: Clothing
2. $$: New Jeans
3. $$: Sur­ro­gate Spend­ing & Lessons Learned by a 16-yo
4. A (qual­i­fied) No-Spend Day
5. $$: No-Spend