Her grandmother's blood flows in her veins

When I was a kid I was a saver.  Every dollar I made from allowance, babysitting, and birthdays went into a piggy bank or a drawer and sat there.  Eventually my mother got us savings accounts and all my money went into that.  As I got older I had to use that money for some things, but mostly the money just kept building up in my bank account.  My older daughter is very much me.  She still has gift cards from a year ago sitting in her purse.  She agonizes over each purchase and whether or not she really needs it.  My other daughter?  Not anywhere close to us.

Darcy spends her money as soon as it hits her palm.  From the moment she earns a dollar she is asking to head to Target.  Once there she purchases things that she doesn't need that usually end up in her father's trashcan on one of his crazy rants through the house.  If she didn't have me snatching money out of her hand and seeing that it gets into her savings account at the bank, the kid wouldn't have a dollar to her name.

This past week she announced that she needed an IPod Touch.  She haaaaaaaddddd to have an IPod Touch.  "I have wanted one for soooooooo long," she told me.  Could she please go to the bank and withdrawl HER money so she could buy one?  I reminded her that she could have purchased one with all her birthday money and the money she earned over the summer and wasn't it a shame that she had blown it all on more Barbies and silly things?  She acknowledged that this was so, but why dwell on that fact when she had more money sitting in the bank?

I made her a deal.  When she had saved up half of the money for the IPod Touch then I would allow her to withdrawl the other half from the bank.  The cost of one was $195.00 at Walmart and Target.  She took the deal and I figured that was the end of that.  We were a good half a year away from heading to the bank.  Boy, was I wrong.

From the moment I made the deal that kid began wheeling and dealing.  She did some work for Tom and was paid.  She offered to loan money to us if we paid interest.  She talked Kelly into paying for some spa treatments that she was offering up.  Pedicure, manicure, facial?  Pay the piper.  She reminded everyone that owed her money exactly how much she loaned them and that the time had come to pay up.  She embraced getting her teeth pulled because that meant the tooth fairy was stopping by with some goodies.  She kept her room clean and volunteered for laundry, trash and dishwasher duty to earn her allowance.  She did her summer homework.  She researched and found that Staples sold the IPod Touch for $185.  It took her less than a week to raise the money.

I had wanted her to learn something from saving.  I had wanted her to sweat and agonize over saving up for something she desperately wanted.   I tried to delay taking her to the bank, but her lawyer sister reminded me that a deal is a deal and Darcy had kept her end of it.  I took her to the bank yesterday and then on to Staples where she purchased her IPod Touch.

From  now on I'm looking to her when I need cash!