Tuesday 31 May 2022

Encouraging my eldest to save.

Becky has been working her part time job in a care home since September last year and she's never had so much money. It's fantastic that she can buy whatever that she wants but her spending just gets silly sometimes and her saving is not so good.

piggy bank

At the moment we are not charging Becky any board because she is still in college full time and we still get child benefit and some other money for her. She knows when she leaves college she will be paying board but the plan was at the moment to save as much as she could while also still having enough left over to spend. Since she has started working she obviously doesn't get any pocket money from us and now she pays for things like her toiletries, fancy shampoo, days out, Netflix, phone bill and luxuries herself so she's not having a totally free ride.

Becky's spending all started off sensibly enough buying things that I wouldn't normally buy her like the Fortnite Advent calendar, a huge water bottle that she had seen on Tik Tok and fancy new trainers and a coat that she did need. 

Since the start of the year her spending did get a bit reckless and silly. Becky was on about something and wanted me to look at her bank account and I spotted all the payments to Just Eat and Uber Eats. Up until a little while ago she was spending about £30 a week on takeaways in two days at college. It's just wasteful. She gets free meals at college because we were under the threshold for the financial assistance and she does love the college meals but I guess McDonalds, Starbucks and Subway seemed more appealing. She has agreed that it is just a waste spending £15 a day on takeaways and now only gets a takeaway delivered to college when she gets paid from work, once a month.

A couple of months ago when Becky got her payslip she said she was planning to buy some headphones which really annoyed me. She has at least 4 sets and only bought some a few weeks before but she said she didn't like those, I said she should have sent them back but she said they could be spare one's. Ugh! The silly spending doesn't stop there though. She bought a humidifier which I think has only ever been switched on when she tested it after it was delivered, just because she saw it on TikTok. She has bought shoes which looked pretty but she has never worn them, she has more clothes than she could ever wear and bags of sweets and chocolate.

As silly as her spending got I feel that now Becky has turned a corner and has started to realise that the treats that she is buying herself don't feel like treats anymore. The takeaways were becoming a habit and she has realised that she was just buying for buying's sake. She's now coming around to my way of thinking that just because she has the money doesn't mean she has to spend it.

Becky has big plans for the future, she has said that she now doesn't want to rent a house or flat to live in, she wants to buy so she is planning to stay living at home and save like mad. I think I am finally getting through to her. I know it won't be easy with the way the economy is at the moment but she is determined and I believe she can do anything that she sets her mind to.

How are your older teenagers doing at handling their money?

2 comments :

  1. My oldest two are definitely savers! Ian has decided to buy a new jet ski with his new full time job paycheck and is also looking into buying himself a truck in the next year or so but assures us that is all he plans on buying. But he's been working since he was 10 or 11 and has quite a savings account going so while those are huge ticket items I know he can afford it and he has no plans to move out anytime soon since he's just graduated high school and wants to (I HOPE!) finish college. We often joke that my middle son still has the first dollar he ever made as he rarely buys anything at all (in all fairness even for holidays or birthday he only asks us to buy him books and is just one of those kids that seems content with what he has). My youngest son was always a spender but since he is fairly young still I don't worry about it too much. One year we just let him spend and buy whatever he wanted and he realized within just a few months that he was broke and that he spent his money on foolish in video game purchases that didn't even help him play.. he's since gotten much better about thinking before he spends and waiting for sales, etc.

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  2. thisiswhereitisat31 May 2022 at 19:25

    This is really useful advice and is something that should be talked about with your children X
    #mmbc

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