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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^i sort of wish her orthodontist took checks. I suppose I could set that up. But they probably queue parents up on the recurring cc because it guarantees their money.

If they’ll take it, I love the idea of my child walking in, waiting for the desk employee to finish their phone call, get the check, ask whose account it posts to. My child benefits seeing the $300 amount on there every month.

Now it’s blind. It’s in the background. My child appreciates our paying, but she doesn’t ‘see’ it when it’s auto-draft. [/quote]

Yes, this is a problem with money in general these days. Everything is automatic and online and paperless.

But I've sat down with my kid to show her things like our electric bill, with charts showing our usage over time and explaining what different line items are, like when they add fees for surge pricing or improvements to the power grid some years. Or we've shown her our household budget and how we decide how much we can spend on, for instance, streaming services. That one was really helpful because sometimes she'll complain when we do the cheap plan for some services and we have to watch ads. Obviously I don't enjoy the ads either, but in some cases this can be the difference between getting that particular streamer at all or not, because we can get the ad-based version for less than $20 for the entire year, versus paying $15-20/mo for the ad-free version. We'll point out how the savings there pay for other entertainment, like going to the movies or going roller skating as a family or going out to dinner, so that we stay in budget for entertainment. That really resonated with her and she seems more thoughtful about how discretionary spending sometimes involves tradeoffs like that. Like let's just do a longer trip to Grandma's this year for summer vacation and then maybe we can go somewhere special outside the US next year. I love that she's thinking that way already.[/quote]

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