Why, no, you can’t have that
Money. Money is harsh to me right now. PBN is talking money and kids this week. I’ve been struggling to get my business up and running. It takes one to two years to become profitable, and yeah – that’s looking to be true. But I keep at it, because my clients like my work, and I know I’m awesome at it. I know it can eventually succeed. But that means no dependable income. My husband has been out of work for 6 months now. We’re just about out of unemployment, and I’m trying to figure out how to get an extension on it. 6 months. We’ve gone through our savings. The only thing left is the retirement I’ve been saving since I was 18 – but I’ve put that off because the 40% hit I would take just hurts too much. In otherwords… Right now, we’re dirt poor. I keep the internet running because that’s my potential livelihood, not an “extra want.” But I have two kids. We’ve now gone through two birthdays on unemployment for them. School supplies needed buying. Shoes needed buying. The school always wants money for a bunch of things (x2 of course.) They need some clothes for cold weather but I can put that off, since it’s still warm here. I keep having to say NO. It’s hard. It’s not so much that they can’t have all the crap they want, the don’t need most of it anyway. What I’m struggling with is keeping them secure. They’re children. I don’t want to scare them with the very bad predicament we’re currently in. They know, obviously, that Dad doesn’t have a job right now. And I’ve told them that the reason they can’t have [insert some random probably DS related item here] is because we don’t have a lot of extra money right now, because Dad doesn’t have a job. And we had to cut their allowance. That was particularly painful, because I didn’t want this to touch them. It’s one thing to say no to a game, that that is a total want, not a need. It’s another to stop giving them their own spending money. They’re 9 & 7 now, and I’m struggling with how much to tell them. We’ve basically kept it to, “There’s not a lot of money right now, so we have to be really really careful about how we spend our money. We have to decide which thing is most important to buy… Groceries?” The 9 year old gets it. The 7 year old doesn’t. And I hate even being in the position. This year, for school, I just kept them out of it. I shopped off of their lists, and didn’t give them any options. I did it all online, and they don’t know what their getting. This way, I was able to shop for the cheapest items, while still getting their proper supplies, and without them begging for other stuff. This year, I just didn’t have the heart to say no – and so I took that option off the table. Cowardly? Probably. Not teaching them about money? No. Just giving them a break. They’ve lived with the unemployment for 6 months as well. Capital One has a new program called MoneyWise to teach parents like me about talking to kids about money, budgets, and other financial matters. This sounds like a fabulous service. Although I could have used it 6 months ago. Instead I fumbled my way through myself. Would using the service have helping me? I don’t know, but you don’t have to find out.
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