Gosh am I feeling old for that line. But my DH and I just finished a 3 hour intro to budgeting with my DSD (24) that ended with her giving us her money to pay her bills and basically give her an allowance to spend on necessities and niceties. She doesn't get it at all. Which is a shame since she's generally a very smart kid, and she's been through pretty much hell and back again, she's trying so hard to get her feet under her and our very dear family friend "uncle" to her, helped her out with renting out one of his properties to her on the cheap and even having the utilities in his name until she can save up for deposits to switch them....
Only as the DH and I found out... she's 3 months behind in both rent and utilities
. Uncle is being good natured about the whole thing and just started by turning off her internet on her. But let her keep her electric and other utilities for now even though he's been footing the bill for them. As I said he's a very very dear and old as the family type of family friend so yeah he feels as though he well and truly is her uncle. He changed her diapers as a baby and was equally devastated when her mother was awarded custody in the divorce even after DFCS had taken the children away from their mother. Truly a nightmare there, but I digress.
She's currently working as a waitress and doing her best to raise her two kids by herself (plus 2 grandparents, 2 doting great-grandparents and 1 awesome uncle) but she has no earthly idea about money. None... Not an ounce of it, as we found out tonight.
She has never dealt with nor once had to create any kind of budget. She doesn't know how to average her tips to determine roughly how much she makes each month, or even if her job is capable of supporting her and her children. And she spent much of the afternoon telling me how she didn't spend her money, she had no idea whatsoever as to why she didn't have enough money for rent. She never bought anything... (tap tap tap on her phone with her freshly manicured nails done up with color changing polish) She doesn't spend her money on anything at all, she saving it up, hasn't spent a dime... well other than her new pants... clothes for the kids (cute little outfits bought at Walmart despite the Gigi's having just bought over 10 outfits from the Salvation Army for next to nothing). But she really no matter how much she thinks about it... her money is just gone... She never even eats out (text from her last week was that she had left the beach and would be bringing the GB along once she finished her chicken tortellini)
And you know.. I was ready to throttle her as she sat there telling me how her money just seemed to have disappeared, maybe someone stole it though she couldn't imagine who... I mean well and truly ready to commit child abuse over it knowing full and well where at least a goodly portion of her money went though there was still about a grand that I couldn't account for. But regardless she had to head to work so we put the discussion on the back burner. My mom dropped her off and we headed over to talk to her uncle to find out just what in the heck was going on and how much were we talking about with her 3 month debt. And as we sat there discussing it at his job, another family seemed to be having the exact same discussion I had just had with my daughter.
Not sure about the youngster's age, since it was the mother talking over the phone to someone else who was clearly old enough to rent their own place, but the mother was yelling about what did he mean he couldn't pay his rent, he had a great job, where did the money go. What do you mean you don't know... It's your money how do you not know where it went... What it just developed legs and walked out of your bank on it's own?!.... You owe how much?!.... Like hell your father and I have that kind of money... How did you get so far behind on your rent?! Cause you had to pay your electric... WHAT?! If you're running a Meth lab you should definitely be able to make your rent?! Well then you tell me how you run up that much in electricity in a month.... It wasn't in just one month... how far behind were you?! Why didn't you pay it sooner?! That's what we're talking about what happened to your money?! You get paid every week...
Loved the mother, normally I hate hearing cellphone conversations but that one was quite entertaining, and a bit comforting to know that wow.... I'm not alone... I was saying practically the same thing just moments before to my own kid. And she was even making the same facial expressions and arm gestures... and when she hung up, she was muttering the same muttered threats of violence I had made when dropping my daughter off to work.
Which begs the question... How many youngsters nowadays have no clue about budgeting??? Even my own mother told me not to be too hard on my daughter because when she made bank deposits for her store there was almost always one many a time two people in there arguing over bounced checks or overdrawn fees and why would the ATM tell them they had x amount of dollars in the bank and then end up overdrawn. (checks and debit cards always in play in those cases. Checks were written and sent out for whatever but they only checked their balance by what the ATM said, not by actually balancing their checkbooks)
It's like no one under the age of 35 knows anything at all about money. It's just the ATM says I have it or I don't, or worse still the checkout accepted it. There's no planning anymore. No clue as to how to determine what they can afford to pay in rent, how to keep their electric bills down, concepts of clipping coupons or at least buying per sales flyers. They work and money just magically appears and even more magically just simply disappears with no rythme or reason because of course the kids today don't
spend their money on anything. (Except everything they see and decide they need.)
I mean she even asked us whether we had trouble with money when we were her age. I mean yeah sure there was the occasional bounced check ($20 or so that was miscalculated) and the odd ($10-50) impulse buy that had us eating ramen for a few weeks. But never once were we more than a grand in debt. Our electric was shut off one time, when the DH hurt himself on the job and while we were waiting for worker's comp to kick in, we had just fixed the car that decided it needed a new coil so there went rainy day funds just before the big ouch. Double whammy knocked us a bit hard, but we got our electric back on the very next day after it was shut down and wasn't a problem there after.
Either way, do they no longer teach this stuff in schools? I mean we learned it during home ec 1, that everyone took boy or girl. You had to learn to care for a kid, change diapers, grind baby food, make bottles all that fun stuff. You had to be able to cook a simple meal, steam/boil some veggies, bake/panfry some meat, and make a starch. You had to create a household budget including everything from rent and utilities to clothing, gas, entertainment and household repairs/upkeep. We had to make a shopping list and menu for 7 days worth of food and we were given a budget we could spend for the week's food, we were welcome to use sales flyers, coupons, price matching, planned leftovers, whatever to get the lowest possible prices and the most nutritional food as our grade for the project was based upon those criteria. I guess just before I left school they changed the name of it to "life skills" or some such nonsense which is a bit funny because they called special needs classes "life skills" before that, but it was a great class that I attended that covered pretty much everything. How to cook, how to clean, how to budget, how to save, how to live without being told what to do by our parents. I did find it a little bit boring because I already knew about 95% of the class before I even attended it, but really it was nice to take the class and start thinking of all the little things you don't consider in life once you're on your own.
But given this seemingly epidemic of clueless kids today... I can't imagine they have that course in schools anymore and I can't imagine it's mandatory if they do. Of course it's not just the school, it's the parents too. How is that my generation isn't teaching their kids how to balance a checkbook, how to save money... to know that the first bill you need to worry about is your room, be it in the form of rent or mortgage and also to know what they can actually afford! 40% of your net income is the most you should pay for housing, any more than that and you simply can't afford it.
Alright, budget rant is done... but believe me as old as I'm feeling, I'm sure there's plenty of other "kids today" rants I can add to this
