satisfied

inner peace
I've been feeling immensely satisfied with my life for the past few months. I've never been unsatisfied necessarily, but I often feel as though I'm searching for my inner peacefulness which is oh-so-close, yet oh-so-far. Lately it's feel as if perhaps I have found my inner peacefulness. Further proof, to me, that I'm closer to that area within myself is that I'm not thinking because I've said this aloud it'll all be yanked away. I could be, but I choose to believe it won't.

Thank goodness for the maturity and wisdom (hopefully) that comes with aging, the support and love of family and friends, the chemical balancing of anti-depressants, and for stability.

allowance
I don't think I ever blogged about this, but back in June we started a cashless allowance system with Avery. I went with cashless for two reasons: 1. the hassle of getting the right cash (namely enough ones) and 2. the movement of our society to a cashless one. This drove me to find a book about a cashless allowance system and then come up with a system for us. I think it's a good system, but it's a good system to implement when she's a bit older. The idea of money in an account is too abstract for her.

We also had a problem of her having too much spending money. Her allowance was $4.75 per week (her age). She would forget about her allowance, or we wouldn't be in stores selling items she wanted, for weeks at a time. Then we'd be out and she'd want to buy something and it seemed she always had money.

Given those two problems, I have switched her to a cash allowance and re-structured it to reduce spending money per week, if not the overall amount. I implemented the save, spend, donate categories that I know a lot of parents use to teach kids about money. I was resistant to telling her how to spend her money because I wanted her to make her own mistakes and learn from there. However, now that I've seen her reactions to having spending money, I realize that she needs the structure initially before being allowed to stray from the structure to learn her own lessons. She now gets $5 per week (a raise you say!), but $2 goes to spending, $2 goes to saving, and $1 goes to donate.

I also adjusted it such that she has to identify what she wants to save up for and stick to that. For example, right now she wants a Doc McStuffins doll that costs $40. I don't want her to get distracted from that goal when she sees some cheap stuff in the checkout line. I want her to feel the process of saving for something, sticking to that, then getting it.

In addition to tangible money, I created some worksheets so she can visually see how much more she has to earn to get whatever her goal is. Those are the green sheets in the picture above.

The goal of having her know how much more she has to save to get her goal item is on-track. Tonight she sat down and counted (correctly) the empty boxes that still need 1's in them to reach her goal.

I just need to get a bunch of one dollar bills and stash them away somewhere so I always have her allowance money ready.

unnecessary gadget I inexplicably want
Deluxe eBook and iPad Holder.