Blogs and Articles

It’s Not My Monkey

I’m going to admit, for better or worse, that when my children (ages 23 and 28 - both of whom are married or partnered) have a problem, it causes me anxiety.  Their problem may be with work, or insurance, or with their spouse or partner.  It may be with their feelings of sadness or anger or anxiety.  It may be with finances or their car.  It doesn’t matter, because the moment I hear of it I want to fix it.  In fact, I often take on the feelings as if they are my own.  I begin internally brainstorming about how to solve the problem....

Financial Lessons for Teens

If I had to choose just one financial lesson for teens to learn before they head into young adulthood it would be the lesson of how money works in real life. In my last post, I said that I don’t believe you should pay your teen for doing chores or getting good grades. In fact, I don’t believe your teen should have to “earn” his allowance in any way. How, then, do we reconcile that with the fact that in “real life” money is earned, not just handed to you? I believe this question arises from a misconception about the definition of allowance. As I stated last time, I define allowance as...

Outside the Box

When my son came home from his first day of school this week, I asked him how it went with regard to using his AmEx PASS card to purchase lunch, since this was one of the things he was wary about when switching from cash to card to receive his allowance. “The place we went to wouldn’t take my card,” he said. “Oh. How did you handle that?” I asked. “I just borrowed money from a friend,” he replied. Ok, but how are you going to pay your friend back, I wondered. Presumably, his friend doesn’t take AmEx either! But I bit my tongue and didn’t ask. I wanted to, I really wanted to! But I...

The Empty Nest

It’s summer. My time is a little less restricted than it usually is because a lot of my clients are away on vacation with their children. I’m spending my free office hours throwing away papers that have accumulated during the past nine or ten months. Earlier in the year, making a decision about throwing these papers away seemed too Herculean a task. Now, they’re just papers and I wonder why I was keeping them and why it was so hard to think about throwing them away earlier. I do this every year though. It’s so predictable that now I laugh at the way I repeat these annual actions....