$1500/month for a PPO health insurance plan with a $6250 first dollar deductible. (countdown to Medicare starting August)
An as of yet unidentified amount (expected to be 2-4x as much as I was paying) to the California FAIR insurance plan…the plan of last resort for all that have been cancelled by their traditional companies due to the decisions/behaviors of Sacramento
Oh… and the higher premiums for auto insurance now that we aren’t bundled with one company
Just about any grocery item I need to ‘panic’ purchase at somewhere other than Costco, TJ’s or Grocery outlet.
Yes! And that busiest airport shut down their huge and full south parking lot (Delta) for reconfiguration and now shut down the airport Marta for 6 weeks (which my son takes to the airport) - so yeah, that driver when you live an hour north of the airport is expensive, but definitely worth it. We used to use a very nice indoor parking area with a shuttle but it is now so overly full, even with reservations, you have to pay for valet parking and it’s getting pricey too. Bad timing all around for airport parking in Atlanta.
I hate spending money on collections for gifts for people in the office - parting gift for leaving boss, boss’ birthday, admin day, wedding, etc. Especially, when I am told the amount to put into the collection. I think I would feel much better about donating to the gift if I wasn’t “given” a required amount. (I immediately do the math in my head and say 25 people each giving that amount is a lot of money.) Somehow collecting for a new baby makes me happy (unlike these other collections).
Back in the day when my kids were in elementary school, the room mom or dad would collect for a Christmas gift for the teacher. Sometimes an end of year gift. Say 30 kids in a class. Usually it would be a gift basket with gift cards in it. I grew very annoyed with this process.
If we contribute to such a gift from our main department (vs our little branch in a different building), I’m told that the card they to the recipient has a list of names who contributed AND the amount! I was floored when I heard that.
Extremely tacky to include the individual amounts, that would make me not contribute at all. I am fine with a list of names, but prefer to be able to “sign” the card (which is what typically happens - I can send a message via email to the organizer and they collate them).
I had completely forgotten about the “class gifts” it has been so many years. We paid class dues to our PTO class moms also (that they used to fund parties and activities through the year.) I hated this gift practice, I would have preferred to give my own gift. My daughter always made cute holiday ornaments, and along with ones for family members, she made ones for her teachers.
I’m just going to say something about gifts for teachers. D1 is a kindergarten teacher and she so, so appreciates the gift cards from Amazon, Target and Starbucks. And to tell you the truth most of the Amazon and Target gift cards are spent on classroom items. She understands that her students love to give little gifts, but how many best teacher mugs, tea towels and other things can one person have? What she really treasures are the handwritten notes and cards from her students. She saves all of these!
At my husband’s workplace, there was a great mix of ages. For gifts, he and older mentors would organize a “give what you want” collections… and then they’d throw in a lot more themselves since they knew younger workers had less expendable income. For one wedding including some coworkers/wives, the older guys kicked in a lot more in order to purchase a very nice bbq grill “from the department” - everybody signed the card,
Honestly, I would much rather have purchased my own gift card for my daughter’s teacher at the end of the year than to be forced to contribute to the class gift that the class mom picked out. I totally get that it would be far more useful for the teacher.
One year there was a spa gift card, a restaurant etc. We’re talking hundreds of dollars. It was just out of hand. Not used to buy supplies - we were given a list at the start of every school year of supplies needed for the classroom. It just turned into this competition.
Yep, there was competition, last year’s class moms bought this teacher such and such with the class money and we need to buy her something better this year. I remember one year the moms buying the teacher a pricey piece of Brighton jewelry.
I hated the group gift in school. Because that assumes that everyone is on equal footing as far as income. Which is never the case.
Unless the contribution was reasonable. It seemed that was rarely the case.
There may be the single parent who can afford a $5 mug bought on clearance. And another who gave a $100 Starbucks card. But we are supposed to all donate the same amount because the teacher has too many mugs?
Maybe I just dislike the whole idea of class gifts
My friend was an elementary school nurse. She said she has enough coffee gift cards to last her lifetime. She also got a lot of restaurant cards.
We also have several teachers in our family. One teaches kindergarten at a title 9 school and she loves the handmade cards. Her daughter teaches in an affluent community and gets pretty extravagant gifts.
D1 teaches at a charter school which serves a low income community. She much prefers the handmade cards and notes so that the families don’t spend money they may not have on her.
My friend is a school nurse in a affluent private school. When we meet at Starbucks it is always her treat because she gets so many of their gift cards from parents.
I was recently going through elementary school items saved into a pocketed memory book. The 3rd grade pocket included a wonderful note that my 3rd grade teacher wrote back to me after we sent her a postcard. It was probably only he 1st or 2nd year teaching. (We once ran into her doing cashier gig a A&P, saving money for a trip.). I adored her and still recall her reading Charlotte’s Web at rest time.