Katsmeow
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2009
- Messages
- 5,308
I am rather uneasily watching my oldest son's upcoming trainwreck. I wish I could prevent it, but I don't really think that I can.
DS is 19 and is planning to move out on his own. The entire situation is fraught with difficulties.
DS started college this fall, living in the dorm. For years, we told our kids that we would pay room and board at a state school as long as grades were good. We paid his very high auto insurance (he had an at fault auto accident before that skyrocketed the rates) and he was to pay for his books and his spending money. Due to needing car repairs he had no money when school started so we advanced the money for books (probably shouldn't have but hoped he would get to school and do well).
All semester he tells me he is doing great. He is capable of doing well as he is very bright. When grades come out (I had insisted on having a login to see his grades), he had failed one course, had an incomplete in another. He was surprised by this and quickly decided he doesn't want to go to school this semester and wants to later get an associates degree in culinary arts. We are OK with this. He floats the idea of living with us and paying rent and we consider it while he is thinking about what he wants to do.
He is home for holidays and we set up some rules..not terribly onerous (let us know when he will be home, don't leave for days at a time without talking to us about how his jobs around the house will be handled, don't have guests for days at a time without talking to us first -- in the past, he would get out of doing household chores by either being gone or having a guest...).
He had a fast food job at his school (about an hour away) and commuted over the holidays to the job with most of his money going to gas.
He violates all the rules and when we raise the issue with him he expresses he would rather live in his car than follow our rules and that he wants to get his own place.
So for the last 3 weeks he has been working on that plan. He needs to find a place to live that he can afford, find a full time job closer to here, get auto insurance of his own, at a minimum.
Despite all this he is very lackadaisacal (sleeping half the day, playing videogames or watching TV when awake and not at work) to the point that I gave him rules that he needed to leave the house every day to look for a job and a place to live. I think in his mind since he had told us he didn't want to follow the rules he thought it was OK to just not follow them but take his time finding a place to live.
At this point, he has gotten back his old high school part time fast food job, has found a room in someone's house (I actually found him listings on Craigslist). He has yet to get insurance for his car and I kept telling he has to do that since he can't be on our policy after he leaves. Despite telling him this for weeks, he only starts looking today even though he plans to move out this weekend.
He managed to end up with a broken window on his car (he has no idea how it happened). He has $9 to his name. He did a budget which I discussed the unrealistic nature of. He had $100 a month for entertainment but $40 to cover auto repair (his car is 11 years old with high mileage), clothing, medical, basically everything except food, rent and insurance. His food estimate is low (he spends most of his money on food). Still if he worked full time he could probably make it with a little start up help if he was very frugal.
He is totally unable to keep money longer than about 24 hours (he once had several hundred dollars in overdraft fees due to repeatedly overdrawing his debit card). Even knowing he was going to move out and do this he spent most of his money from work and Christmas on frivolous stuff.
DH and I are going to give him roughly what we would have spent for room and board this semester. It will pay for a few months of rent and some of his start up expenses. DH thinks it is totally throwing money away since DS has to learn everything the hard way and won't listen at all. He thinks the chance of DS making it financially and paying rent consistently are about zero. Therefore, he thinks that DS will soon get evicted. I tend to think he is right...but I still want to give the money. From my standpoint, if he actually used the money and diligently tried to find a better job he could probably make it if he was very frugal. That said...I don't think he will really look for a better job and isn't going to be frugal.
We have also said that if he wants to go back to school in the fall we will pay his tuition but not living expenses (we've always said we would pay for them to live in the dorm not to live in an apartment which is way more expensive).
I just don't see this ending well. Even after I went over money with him, he still goes out, spends money on eating out or with friends. He hasn't been all that diligent looking for a full time non-minimum wage job. I hate to say it but he doesn't seem to have much of a work ethic. I have the feeling that he would be OK living in our house -- so long as he didn't have to follow household rules and didn't have to do any chores -- and paying us a small part of his minimum wage income. This is not acceptable to us as we aren't willing to have him treat our house like a hotel and not follow our rules (particularly as we have two other kids still at home).
He has always been someone that has to learn from his own mistakes. When he was a freshman in high school I warned him that he was doing inadequate studying and was going to fail if he didn't turn in work. We tried to help him, sent him to a tutor, etc. He failed 4 classes. That did wake him up and then he did better later on. But he just won't listen to anything anyone else tells him.
Sigh. (I do think much of this is impacted by his early life. We adopted him from another country when he was almost 9. He lived a life of poverty before he came here and had a parent who didn't regularly work, the parent was involved in petty theft, etc.)
DS is 19 and is planning to move out on his own. The entire situation is fraught with difficulties.
DS started college this fall, living in the dorm. For years, we told our kids that we would pay room and board at a state school as long as grades were good. We paid his very high auto insurance (he had an at fault auto accident before that skyrocketed the rates) and he was to pay for his books and his spending money. Due to needing car repairs he had no money when school started so we advanced the money for books (probably shouldn't have but hoped he would get to school and do well).
All semester he tells me he is doing great. He is capable of doing well as he is very bright. When grades come out (I had insisted on having a login to see his grades), he had failed one course, had an incomplete in another. He was surprised by this and quickly decided he doesn't want to go to school this semester and wants to later get an associates degree in culinary arts. We are OK with this. He floats the idea of living with us and paying rent and we consider it while he is thinking about what he wants to do.
He is home for holidays and we set up some rules..not terribly onerous (let us know when he will be home, don't leave for days at a time without talking to us about how his jobs around the house will be handled, don't have guests for days at a time without talking to us first -- in the past, he would get out of doing household chores by either being gone or having a guest...).
He had a fast food job at his school (about an hour away) and commuted over the holidays to the job with most of his money going to gas.
He violates all the rules and when we raise the issue with him he expresses he would rather live in his car than follow our rules and that he wants to get his own place.
So for the last 3 weeks he has been working on that plan. He needs to find a place to live that he can afford, find a full time job closer to here, get auto insurance of his own, at a minimum.
Despite all this he is very lackadaisacal (sleeping half the day, playing videogames or watching TV when awake and not at work) to the point that I gave him rules that he needed to leave the house every day to look for a job and a place to live. I think in his mind since he had told us he didn't want to follow the rules he thought it was OK to just not follow them but take his time finding a place to live.
At this point, he has gotten back his old high school part time fast food job, has found a room in someone's house (I actually found him listings on Craigslist). He has yet to get insurance for his car and I kept telling he has to do that since he can't be on our policy after he leaves. Despite telling him this for weeks, he only starts looking today even though he plans to move out this weekend.
He managed to end up with a broken window on his car (he has no idea how it happened). He has $9 to his name. He did a budget which I discussed the unrealistic nature of. He had $100 a month for entertainment but $40 to cover auto repair (his car is 11 years old with high mileage), clothing, medical, basically everything except food, rent and insurance. His food estimate is low (he spends most of his money on food). Still if he worked full time he could probably make it with a little start up help if he was very frugal.
He is totally unable to keep money longer than about 24 hours (he once had several hundred dollars in overdraft fees due to repeatedly overdrawing his debit card). Even knowing he was going to move out and do this he spent most of his money from work and Christmas on frivolous stuff.
DH and I are going to give him roughly what we would have spent for room and board this semester. It will pay for a few months of rent and some of his start up expenses. DH thinks it is totally throwing money away since DS has to learn everything the hard way and won't listen at all. He thinks the chance of DS making it financially and paying rent consistently are about zero. Therefore, he thinks that DS will soon get evicted. I tend to think he is right...but I still want to give the money. From my standpoint, if he actually used the money and diligently tried to find a better job he could probably make it if he was very frugal. That said...I don't think he will really look for a better job and isn't going to be frugal.
We have also said that if he wants to go back to school in the fall we will pay his tuition but not living expenses (we've always said we would pay for them to live in the dorm not to live in an apartment which is way more expensive).
I just don't see this ending well. Even after I went over money with him, he still goes out, spends money on eating out or with friends. He hasn't been all that diligent looking for a full time non-minimum wage job. I hate to say it but he doesn't seem to have much of a work ethic. I have the feeling that he would be OK living in our house -- so long as he didn't have to follow household rules and didn't have to do any chores -- and paying us a small part of his minimum wage income. This is not acceptable to us as we aren't willing to have him treat our house like a hotel and not follow our rules (particularly as we have two other kids still at home).
He has always been someone that has to learn from his own mistakes. When he was a freshman in high school I warned him that he was doing inadequate studying and was going to fail if he didn't turn in work. We tried to help him, sent him to a tutor, etc. He failed 4 classes. That did wake him up and then he did better later on. But he just won't listen to anything anyone else tells him.
Sigh. (I do think much of this is impacted by his early life. We adopted him from another country when he was almost 9. He lived a life of poverty before he came here and had a parent who didn't regularly work, the parent was involved in petty theft, etc.)