Stop Spending My Money, Mom

Posted on | December 8, 2007 |

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 for Further Reading

• No Related Posts

Comments