Archive for the ‘Options’ Category
I’m making a stand with wet hands!
It’s been six long months and my hands are cleaner than ever. Who would have thought I would make it this far?
I am referring to life without a dishwasher. Around mid-December, ours broke. My first reaction was sheer terror. I’m pretty sure I almost lost consciousness. Like many families struggling to make ends meet, I didn’t have any savings to buy another. The word credit kept flashing in my mind, but we were just managing what we had. I took a deep breath, pulled up my rubber gloves, and started washing.
It wasn’t so bad. “Not much more work then rinsing the dishes, loading and unloading the dishwasher”, I thought. Day 2! – It occurred to me that growing up we never had a dishwasher, we, gasp, washed and dried them – by hand. I then had a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious!). My gosh, we are raising a generation of kids who never have to wash dishes. Visions of power failures and piles of dirty dishes flashed by. I decided to start operation “Dishpan Kids”. I asked, in a way that made it sound incredibly exciting, “Who wants to learn how to wash dishes?”. It was fun. The family doing dishes together. What a concept.
I will admit, I had some setbacks. Entertaining guests poses some additional challenges (clean-up takes slighly longer than loading the dishwaher) and some surprises (during our last get-together, the guys did the dishes while the girls played cards…hmmmm…). A month or so after we began “Operation Dishpan Kids” I found out that the dishwasher actually was not broken. It’s something under the sink (that’s as intelligent as I get on that subject). It will probably take an hour and 20 bucks to fix. But you know what? I’m ok. I think I can go without. In fact, I kind of like it. I enjoy watching my family share in the responsibility and I have a really great two-level dish rack to dry my dishes on. 
I, like many others, jumped on “The Secret” bandwagon. I watched the movie and began incorporating the process into my life. It wasn’t that difficult, I’m generally a positive thinker . A few years ago, my friend gave me “The Secret” calendar with a thought for each day. There is one that particularily caught my interest. It was about money. And for the past decade or so, money, or lack thereof, had been an issue for me and my family. The thought went like this…
…but at what cost?
I’ve been struggling holding off buying my kids a DS. My daughter is 7 and my son is 5. All their friends have one. I have a momentary flask back, “But Mum, I plead, all my friends have jeans”. (I was in Grade 6 and still wearing polyester pants). That was 1978. Oh how far we’ve come. Hmmm. Really. Today’s pleas would be “But Mum, all my friends have a DS, computer, ipod, cell phone, (fill in the blank).”
But alas, there’s something we have today that we didn’t have in 1978. Endless sources of credit. If the bank says no, don’t worry, there’s Finance Companies. If they refuse you, no problem, just about any store can give you some type of credit from a credit card to a no-payment no-interest deal. You can give your kids everything you never had. But at what cost?
Well, first there is the interest cost. The more difficult it is for you to get credit, the more interest you will pay. Then there’s the cost of having to upgrade the DS to the latest model when their friends do so. And let’s not ignore the costs of teaching your kids that they “should” have everything they want. No worries, our credit system will be there by their side as they get older and struggle to maintain their lifestyle on a meager wage and potentially high student loan debt.
Maybe its time to stop keeping up with the Joneses and evaluate our own family values. Me?! I’ve decided the hand-me-down Gameboys can last a bit longer and told my kids they can get a DS when they save up enough money. By then, two more versions will have come out and we should get a pretty sweet deal on Kijij, or, better yet, a hand-me-down from a more progressive friend.
And who knows, they just might learn a valuable financial lesson in the meantime.
Thanks Mum – for teaching me a “valuable lesson”, even though I whined and complained the whole time.
I know…it seems wrong doesn’t it? You are in a state of having to consider filing for bankruptcy and you find out that you have to pay. Often I get asked, “How can someone pay you if they are bankrupt?” The answer is simple in most cases…the definition of ’being insolvent’ is that ‘you are unable to meet your obligations as they become due’. An insolvent person can often pay something on their debt, just not what their creditors are asking or demanding.
More often than not, the amount you are required to pay into your bankruptcy is a manageable payment, considering what you are required to pay to maintain your current debt (let alone pay it off).
The amount an individual pays varies depending on the level of income and the expenses they have. The best way to determine what you have to pay is to meet with a Trustee in Bankruptcy. This simple Bankruptcy Payment Calculator will help you estimate what that payment might be.
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