Add this to the list of clothing/shopping manipulations
All the kids have a clothing budget. We said it was for the school year, that they could get both warm and cold weather clothes with it.
They all have plenty of clothes and none of them used their whole budget. This is the first year we did it and to me it means we over budgeted. They are only supposed to get clothes using their budgeted monies, or their own funds.
One of them has learned that he can sucker DH into taking him shopping and paying for clothes if:
1. He claims he outgrew clothes (the logic being he paid already and shouldn't have to use his fund for replacements...he and DH forget that we only said we'd replace shoes).
2. He claims they are lost/X must have gone to Goodwill (I do not put any kids clothes in goodwill, except for DS after talking to him).
Apparently losing your clothes...whether accidental or on purpose and outgrowing them warrants a shopping trip on DH.
The latest scam with the above is one of them claiming he has no swim trunks. Really? The kid who just finished his last level of swimming in the fall and has always had two pair of trunks has zero now? I even described the two sets of trunks to DH. And that I would not be surprised if they are crumpled in the back of a drawer or somehow at BMs.
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Oh and the clothes budget? DS
Oh and the clothes budget? DS is at the point where we go to a store, we talk about what he is looking for and how much that might cost. I hand him that amount of money from his budget and he does the rest. He's made mistakes. He's had to live with them.
The skids? They never have an idea of the approximate total, don't have to worry about not having enough money, and DH handles the whole transaction so they don't learn that either. They never touch their budgeted money. They have a vague idea of their balance and no idea of what got them there.
I'd have to go back and look
I'd have to go back and look but I believe the one in adult clothes got $450-500 and the ones still in kids clothes got $300-350. But they had to buy their clothes including dress clothes out of that. At least one pair of nice shoes and one pair of sneakers.
We bought uw, socks, pjs, and winter gear.
We privately agreed that if a kid had to buy something twice because of a growth spurt, we'd buy the stuff if it happened again.
And none of them have used it all, so we may not give them as much next year or this years extra goes toward growth spurts.
We start the budget about two weeks before school starts.
Though it's not ideal, it has cut way down on the amount of shopping trips the one wNtsd to go on when he didn't have to think about his own money. And the other two are loathe to go shopping so if they actually go, they are more invested in the outcome.