$$: Allowance, Food, & Supplies

The Daugh­ter stayed home sick today so I took the oppor­tu­nity to get some bank­ing busi­ness attended to and also used the car to run a few errands.

The Daugh­ter — $100.00

The first order of busi­ness was get­ting me added to The Daughter’s check­ing account.  When she opened this account last spring she was so excited to finally be able to open an account all on her own.  Up to that point, every check­ing, every sav­ings, and every CD she’d opened had had to be a cus­to­dial account.  So as a demon­stra­tion of her inde­pen­dence, she opened the account in her name only.

Well, inde­pen­dence is fine and good but come to find out that there are some seri­ous incon­ve­niences when your mom isn’t a cosigner.  For exam­ple, mom can’t auto­mat­i­cally trans­fer your allowance every month on the 1st of the month because mom doesn’t have access to your account online.  No, mom has to write a paper check every month and then either you or she has to take it to the bank and deposit that check and since you leave at 6am every day and get home after 6 every evening and your mom doesn’t have the use of a car most days, get­ting that allowance into your check­ing account sud­denly becomes com­pli­cated.  It doesn’t take a great deal of imag­i­na­tion to guess that the sit­u­a­tion becomes even more com­pli­cated when you leave town (maybe even leave the state) to go off to col­lege.  Sud­denly, hav­ing a check­ing account inde­pen­dent of a par­ent isn’t as glam­orous as it once seemed.  Besides, your allowance is yours to do with what you want and your mom has never, ever made any com­ments or inquiries about what you do with your money even when she has full access to your bank state­ments online.  This is one area in which pri­vacy is just not an issue.

Bless the bank employee, too, who — against com­pany pol­icy — let me take the sig­na­ture card home to the ail­ing Daugh­ter so she could sign it instead of mak­ing us wait another month or two before we’d find a time when we could both be at the bank at the same time dur­ing bank hours.  This employee knew us both — in fact, she’s the one who help get The Daugh­ter set up with a credit card from the bank — and she did call The Daugh­ter on the phone to get some info.  I’m am deeply grate­ful to this employee for help­ing us out.  So the paper­work is done and by Fri­day I should be able to see The Daughter’s check­ing account when I log in to my accounts online.  The Daughter’s sav­ings account is still all her own; no need for access to that one and, after all, the girl should be held wholly respon­si­ble for some of her own banking.

While at the bank, I went ahead and wrote a check to The Daugh­ter for her Jan­u­ary allowance and deposited it into her check­ing account.  The terms of the allowance is that it will be paid on the first of each month and now that I can do it online, I’ll make sure it gets done on time.

Nat­ural Gro­cers — $32.22

I had a han­ker­ing for chicken faji­tas for din­ner tonight so I stopped for some din­ner sup­plies and other goodies:

• Wil­low River Havarti cheese — $3.69
• Wil­low River Muen­ster cheese — $3.12
• 10 Brown Cow cream top vanilla yogurt cups — $0.59/ea.
• .6# organic tomato — $2.15
• .49# organic onion — $0.53
• pkg of 4 skin­less bone­less organic chicken breast halves — $8.99
• gal­lon of Hori­zon 2% milk — $5.19
• organic cream cheese — $2.49

Kroger — $13.90

• tam­pax — $7.00
• Pace picante sauce — $1.35
• .64# green bell pep­per — $0.75
• .64# con­ven­tional tomato — $1.40
• 2 avo­ca­dos — $1.00/ea.

Related posts:

1. $$: Fluff
2. Day 192: Groceries
3. $$: No-Spend
4. Day 242: No-Spend Day*
5. A (qual­i­fied) No-Spend Day