feedback for "The New Economics of Parenthood"

1. Kids don't need so much stuff!
   
   Buy used clothes, books, and toys. Have a birthday party at home. Drive a used car and live in a modest house. Visit the library, park, and museum instead of paying for a Mommy-and-Me class. Start spending money on music lessons, dance classes, and sports when they are 8, not 3. As a piano and flute teacher, I promise you they will not be behind after a few years.
   
   I'm only 26 and I can't believe how stupid people are with their money...

   posted by : thrifty mommy on 3/17/2008 at 1:35 PM Flag For Abuse

2. "Oh poor upper middle class parents"?
   
   I see the same things happening on the military base we live on (where you KNOW how much your neighbors are making). It's ridiculous. "We don't have any money, but since So-and-So down the street got a new TV (X-box, car, whatever), we just had to get one too."
   
   Stop being a sheep - just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean it's a good thing to do.
   
   If your friends are so shallow as to judge you by what you do or don't have, get new friends.

   posted by : Seriously on 3/17/2008 at 2:00 PM Flag For Abuse

3. Great piece, nice to hear it from someone other than myself. I started a college fund for Wednesday when she was 4 months old thank goodness and thanks to being a Canadian the gov't has probably given more than I have. Also, like thrifty mama says, second hand goods are your and the environments friend!

   posted by : GoneAway on 3/17/2008 at 2:01 PM Flag For Abuse

4. It's always a good idea to differentiate between "need" and "want." But I have noticed what I call the "expand to fit" theory... the more you make and/or the bigger living quarters you have, the more you spend and the more junk you have clogging up the place. I don't quite understand how we made it just fine when I was making $15K less than I am now (and my husband made nothing, and our mortgage payment has stayed the same), and yet we, too, are not saving anything. At the time, we didn't have our son, but I have a hard time believing that he is costing us that much, particularly since he is under 2 and doesn't go to daycare.
   
   Thanks for the challenge of documenting what we spend for a month... I'm sure it will be eye-opening.

   posted by : raincitykitty on 3/17/2008 at 2:27 PM Flag For Abuse

5. This degree of spending is insane and I see how it's not only effecting our family, but everyone we know with kids. People now are actually making less then their parents did when we look at inflation, but economists tell us it's all ok because now both parents are working, which means the house hold income is greater. They forget that the costs of energy, which families didn't use nearly as much of has increased. The average commute to work is 45 minutes. The dollar is losing value in a global economy. The free market paradise is collapsing in on itself growing weaker by the moment, overwhelmed with junk, debt and a need to consume everything in it's path. It's not just the outrageous birthday bashes or the SUVs which are the only "family" cars. It's the over consumption of simple resources like food. There is not a single family in America who really needs two carts of groceries every week. Or needs a TV in every room of the house. Or a single child who needs 40 webkins. I'm grateful for the gifts people have given us, but my daughter doesn't need clothing from osh kosh or the gap. I mean for that kind of money they could have bought her some organic clothing. She doesn't need 4 thousand toys either or garbage bag after garbage bag of hand me down clothing. Or pampers, I would have been more then delighted if people gave us that money instead I could have put it towards buying cloth diapers (our house burned down by the way, right after x-mas and my daughter's birthday, which is why people gave us so much stuff...we have rooms full of it). We don't need a membership to the YMCA ($600 from my boyfriend's parents) when we have a perfectly nice neighborhood we can run around in, close to two playground and walking distance into the city. I feel the need to detox. Not from all the chemicals, but from all this stuff. I even grew up poor with way to much stuff, most of which I left at my mom's house when I moved out at 18. Every year I throw away clothing I don't need (or I mean donate it) and I think I would be way better off not buying in the first place. I really don't need 3 pairs of sneakers anyways.
   
   I loved the quote that we are spending our child's college fund at Target. We are! Every weekend we spend $300 between junk, sushi and gas.

   posted by : dhsredhead on 3/17/2008 at 2:32 PM Flag For Abuse

6. I was just ahving this convo with a friend the other day...I don't remember wanting for anything as a child, but when I think back on it, we didn't have extravagant toys, my mother sewed most of our clothes, our best birthday parties were the make-your-own-pizza parties in my kitchen. I do wonder where this keeping up with the Joneses mentality comes from, but I fall prey to it too. In fact, just last week, we visited a friend's house for an impromptu play date, and as I watched my 2yo son (dressed in his best hand-me-down jeans and sweatshirt) go nuts over the sheer quantity of toys in his friend's bedroom, I started to really feel sorry for my boy that he only has a handful of toy cars and some books in his room...WHAT? Isn't a bedroom for sleeping, not playing? I really got down on myself for a little while, thinking that I'm just not providing the right number of plastic-junk toys for my son. How sick!
   
   We have really had to reign in our spending since buying a bigger home (with 3x the mortgage and no hope of pay raises) last year, so I remind myself all the time that our home is our son's nest egg. It would be so nice, though, to be able to put a little bit away each month...it's comforting, or at least temporarily puts off my anxiety, to read that other upper-middlers are going through the same "we'll never make enough!" nuttiness.

   posted by : totty on 3/17/2008 at 2:42 PM Flag For Abuse

7. This was a really interesting piece--I wonder how many people see themselves in it, and aren't going to comment. (It seems like the only people commenting are the ones who view this behavior from a distance, and don't do it themselves.)
   
   "Upper-middlers" (as totty calls them) have NO ONE TO BLAME BUT THEMSELVES if they are making $300,000/year and barely making ends meet!! Jeezaloo, people, how much sense does that make?? My husband and I make about $85,000 a year; my car is ten years old, and his is six. We rent. We are still paying down debt we ran up when we both lost our jobs in 2001 (it's taken us 6 years to pay it down by half). I buy my 4 y.o. daughter's clothes at Wal-Mart, and take hand-me-downs from neighbors (though occasionally I will buy a few cute outfits at the OshKosh B'Gosh outlet when they're having a sale and I have a coupon). I don't shop at Target anymore, because I always end up spending $100 on crap we don't really need.
   
   We haven't always been good about living within our means, but we are getting better--it requires discipline, and being able to say "No" as much to yourself as to your kids. No video games. No cable. No cell phone for a tween (are you kidding me? What does an 11-year old need with a cell phone?). I buy her decent shoes (which can be pricey, esp. when they grow so fast!) and I forked out $29.00 for a swim suit from Lands End because I went the cheap route last year and ended up spending more than $30 for two suits that each fell apart after a few weeks. Some things I'll spend the money on because they're quality and should last. Otherwise, it's cheap all the way. She doesn't know the difference, and even when she finally does, she's going to get the same speech I got: "You're just going to grow out of it/ruin it/play in it anyway" (btw, we had horses when I was growing up, so we spent the money on vet bills, etc.).
   
   I wonder how soon we'll be hearing about Gen-Xers living in senior poverty because they didn't save for retirement, either?

   posted by : katydidmama on 3/17/2008 at 5:47 PM Flag For Abuse

8. Having grown up poor, my second-worst fear is dying poor, right after my worst fear: raising my kids poor. To me, being poor isn't about whether or not you have fancy things. It means not being able to eat well and dress adequately. It means not being able to have access to a wide range of choices about what you want to do with your life. Sure, I like having nice things, but I'm cool with having less in order to have more security and more choices.
   
   My husband and I have a pretty good combined income, but we're careful with how we spend. And in the past couple of years, we've been conducting this ongoing exercise in purging our home of unnecessary stuff. It's amazing how liberating it's been. It's like the more we get rid of, the more we realize how little we all need. And interestingly, we've realized that -- for us, anyway -- stuff attracts more stuff. Soon after we started cleansing our home of useless crap, we found that we developed way better filters for keeping new useless crap from creeping in (notwithstanding the franchised plastic kids' merchandise that well-meaning family members keep giving us, which gets relegated to the basement within a couple of weeks of arriving, either because it breaks or because our kid is already bored with it... because let's face it, once the shiny-plasticky novelty wears off, those toys are boring). Sigh.

   posted by : Doppelganger on 3/18/2008 at 1:58 AM Flag For Abuse

9. I am so amazed at how people throw their money away on worthless crap and then whine that it's so hard to keep up with paying everything. A family that can't do better than just get by on $300,000 is obviously ridiculously foolish with their money. They should be ashamed and learn how to handle money better.
   
   I'm a stay-at-home mom (homeschooling my children) and my husband makes about 70,000 a year. We have 8 children and we get by okay. Yes, sometimes things are tight and I'll even admit that sometimes we have made poor decisions on spending, but overall I think we're doing really well financially, considering our large family. We have a retirement fund through his work, an emergency savings fund and have no debt except our home mortgage and the mortgage on the rental house we own.
   
   People just aren't willing to make sacrifices or tell their children no. My children, who don't always get the stuff they want and wear thrift store clothes, but get have lots of time with me and my husband will probably be better adjusted and financially smarter than those children whose parents give them most everything they want.

   posted by : stop whining on 3/18/2008 at 1:06 PM Flag For Abuse

10. We are a middle class household of 2 grownies and 1 toddler and are highly educated. We can't even imagine saving for retirement right now because we have $170K in student loan debt because of our education. THAT is what is killing us (and A LOT of our friends).

    posted by : PoorPhD on 3/18/2008 at 5:10 PM Flag For Abuse

11. I LOVED the line about paying for smack and getting whippets. Hilarious.
    
    My solution to this problem is to be poor. Seriously, we have very little money, so we spend very little money. I can't afford cheap plastic crap all the time, because that's the grocery funds. You buy the Dora thing and then there's no bread that week, and that really helps you step back. We also didn't have cable until recently, and even now we limit it for my son to afternoon Simpsons (classic!) and avoid most of the kid-centric commercials and therefore a lot of the "buy, buy, buy!" mentality. It's not perfect, but for us right now it works. I'm just scared that once we have more disposable income, things are going to go crazy and we're not going to get ahead any more than we are now.

    posted by : superblondgirl on 3/19/2008 at 8:56 AM Flag For Abuse

12. I second the student loan thing. My husband and I make $120K a year and still seem to live paycheck to paycheck even though we have NO DEBT besides student loans. My car is 11 years old and I buy my professional clothes at Target or on Ebay. It sucks, and it's hard not to be a brat when someone implies that you are mismanaging your money and that's why you can't save anything for retirement. I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off, financially, just getting a four-year degree.

    posted by : anonymous2 on 3/19/2008 at 2:22 PM Flag For Abuse

13. While researching a book I just published for moms, I came across another book that really hit home with me. It is called, "The Price of Privilege" and talks in scary terms about how children who have too much stuff and are too busy end up suffering for it. They lack imagination, independence, they grow up not knowing how to make themselves happy and they have no sense of how to achieve success, how to overcome failure, and even how to have grounded relationships.
    
    There comes a point in your life when you just don't want to be surrounded by junk anymore. It feels better to pare down than to keep acquiring. I find it scary how many people can't find happiness unless they own something new, or keep up with the Jonses. I'm no saint -- I LOVE shopping and for me, travel is very important (and very expensive as my family lives in Europe) but I also like a bargain. So I curb my tendency to want new things and try to only indulge in one weakness: buying books. If my kids get me in the right mood anywhere near a bookstore, beware, there goes my paycheck out the window!
    
    Katrin
    www.momstimeouts.com

    posted by : selfishmom on 4/24/2008 at 1:47 PM Flag For Abuse

14. I would love to have problems like this.

    posted by : Siobhan Pippen on 12/21/2008 at 5:34 PM Flag For Abuse