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You’re cut off!
You know things have to be pretty complicated and dicey if a parent decides to do that to a kid.
But does that make this dad an a**hole?
Let’s see what happened…
AITA for cutting my daughter’s financial support off and monitoring every cent she spends?
“I’m so livid right now about the entire situation that I can’t see straight and make a fair judgment.
My daughter is heading off to college this year. I and my wife both decided years ago that if/when she went to college, we did not want her working to support herself. Well, now that time has come and we’ve been working on ways to make sure she can fully focus on her education.
I and my wife budgeted out a monthly allowance for her, along with her tuition payments. A big part of this is that I want to also teach her to budget out her money and figure out how to handle her own purchasing. While she was still going to live at home while she went to school home, and it was made clear she could still eat with us and use some of our stuff, we expect her to start buying her own necessities and prepare her food (we also cut back on our grocery bill to an appropriate amount to only cover I, my wife, and our other child.)
We decided this would take effect in June and made sure for months that she would be ready for it (we taught her how to balance a checkbook, income vs expenses, the basics of cooking, etc.) To say the first month was a disaster is an understatement. Within only eleven days, she had blown through her entire monthly allowance.
This was not an insignificant amount either. We gave her 1000$, and she blew through it in 11 days. She does not pay any rent, utilities, health insurance, etc. She had no clue how she blew through that much money, but I figured it out incredibly quickly.
She spent 500$ alone eating out, 300 at Walmart on who knows what, and the rest on gas somehow (again, in a car she does not pay for at all.)
She then asked if it would be possible to increase the amount of money she was being given. I lost it. I held nothing back and told her there was no way in hell this was going to happen again. The experiment was over and there was no d**n way I was going to give her a single cent of unsupervised money. We spent months teaching her.
And I mean literally every weekend I was teaching her how to be a responsible adult. I told her that I was the most disappointed in her I have ever been at that moment, and she knows I feel I have failed as a parent. We are not rich, never have been, 500$ out of every one of my paychecks is a very, very noticeable amount.
I’ve been monitoring her like a hawk ever since. I give her no more than 20$ cash and if she ever wants to use her card she needs to tell me the exact amount so I can transfer it over. This has not been easy and has caused strain on our relationship. I just tell her now she can get a job if she wants because then at least its her own money.
Now though, I’m getting backlash from extended family who have learned what’s going on. My wife is in firm agreement but now I’m second-guessing myself.”
Here’s how Reddit users reacted to this.
This reader said he’s the a**hole and that he waited way too long to teach his daughter life skills.
Photo Credit: Reddit
Another Reddit user agreed and said she has to learn by doing.
Photo Credit: Reddit
And this individual also he’s the a**hole and talked about their own experiences.
Photo Credit: Reddit
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