Parent Guilt...when it comes to finances

blossom
Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:26:14 +0000

I am in my 50’s and yet know a lot of adults my age who just don’t know how much things cost. Someone who works for me who makes a nice salary leases a car; doesn’t understand why I drive a clunker when I could be driving a fancy car too for X per month. Yet every time she has to drive out of town to take care of an elderly parent she whines about the mileage, something or other having to do with her lease, I don’t know. Every dent or ping is a crisis. And her insurance is something she complains about incessantly.

I drive a clunker. I paid cash. I have a high deductible on my insurance and my rates are low. The car cost me a lot to purchase outright, but over the lifetime and 100K miles and still going strong, costs me very little to operate. My colleague actually has no idea how much her car costs her to drive, since she trades it in as soon as the lease it up and drives off with another fancy vehicle which depreciates the second she leaves the lot.

And so on. Otherwise reasonable adults don’t know now much they are paying to live in their houses, since they used them as ATM’s by tapping into their equity for as long as the banks would let them. They don’t understand that their $500 TV costs them $1500 because they put in on their Visa (“to get the miles”) and then took forever to pay it off. And they have no idea how much their cellphone is costing, since they have a family plan “and everything is basically free”. I love that- it’s either free (i.e. you pay nothing) or it’s not. And if it’s not free- in other words, you get a bill which you have to pay, the fact that your minutes are unlimited probably means you are paying more than you need to for your phone.

So OP- you are doing your kid a huge favor by introducing her to the tough concept that it costs money to own things, to operate things, to live in things. If nobody ever had to repair a leaky roof or fix a muffler or replace a broken front step, we’d all have tons of disposable income which we’d be using in Cannes right this very second. She will have to defer some spending in order to pay to fix her car, and you will take great pride in allowing her to do that.