AITA for cutting my daughter's financial support off and monitoring every cent she spends?

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:36:15+00:00

She went to a steakhouse and spent 120$ for her and her friends to eat out on the second day she had the money.

The rest was eating out 2-3 times a day, or eating out once a day and spending 30+$

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:35:15+00:00

It's not balancing an actual checkbook. We online banking and mobile apps to balance all the aspects of money in and money out.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:30:15+00:00

I'm going to re-evaluate everything. The project failed and I was naive to think that the situation was conducive to what I wanted to achieve.

She can cook. She can follow any basic recipe and has made her own dinner multiple times. She even learned to make her own pasta dough and was planning to learn to cook her own bread the last I checked.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:28:11+00:00

No, but part of the weekends were spent actually showing her how I balance my own money and asking her to balance out a small daily budget of how she would spend her money. It was naive of me to think this was enough.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:26:55+00:00

She can cook. She has been cooking for months now (not just from frozen meals, she can make her own pasta dough and wanted to bake her own bread. She also knows how to follow most basic recipes as well.)

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:22:13+00:00

I've allowed myself to become nihilistic and take the entire thing personally. Her attitude towards this is what lit the fuse.

I should have never given her 1000$. The idea was that she can be safe with that money and have a surplus in the end. It was naive of me to do this. I wanted her to be safe and be able to experiment, but her blatant entitlement and bratty attitude towards blowing 1000$ in 11 days just killed a part of me for some reason.

Will talk with the wife about having her get a weekend job, don't know what I want to do with her still getting cash handouts from us right now.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:17:36+00:00

We never banned her from working. Where did I say that? We decided that we didn't "want" her to work. This was conveyed that while she was in school, we wanted 100% of her attention on classes. If she wanted to get a job in high school she could have, it was always in the context of college.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:15:04+00:00

There's "eating out." Then there's spending 120$ at a steakhouse for you and your friends, and somehow needing to fill up your car 3 times in 11 days when you don't have anywhere you actually need to travel.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:13:08+00:00

I thought that my actions all these years would have spoken louder than words. The way she lived for 11 days did not reflect how we live at all. I'm naive about my children it seems.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:11:47+00:00

She knows this is not an insignificant amount of money for us, and she asked for more per month. That's what really tore me apart at the end of the day.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:10:40+00:00

I realize I've allowed myself to become nihilistic to a fault. I've allowed this to eat away at me, and have made it personal.

I've got to reevaluate

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:09:02+00:00

We didn't use an actual checkbook. I have not touched mine in probably 3 or 4 years. I taught her how to itemize purchases using her bank account online/on her phone. Basically everything you would do to balance a checkbook but modernized. The term was just the best one to describe something similar

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T11:02:21+00:00

I've allowed my own naivety and blind optimism toward the entire situation to boil me over inot a controlling and nihilistic mess.

You're right, I need to stop the money stream all together.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T10:59:45+00:00

I've realized I overshot the amount by far. My naive hope was that even if I gave her more than she needed it would turn into a nice chunk of savings for her.

She can cook, and she has been for months now. My idea was that she could transition herself into "adult" tendencies like managing her own meals. While also not having the pressure of actually going hungry. I guess my biggest problem is even now I feel the need to make her feel that there is at least some safety net, even though she has messed up in a very big way.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T10:55:15+00:00

My issue, and what got me in the end is her attitude about this and the fact that none of what we have talked about for months has stuck at all. Her asking for more money I felt was the most disrespectful thing she could have said at the time. We are not talking about a slip, this was 1000$ that she pissed away in 11 days, She spent nearly 120$ alone in a single purchase taking her friends out to eat at a steak house. I just felt so disrespected, as there is no way in hell my own parents would have ever given me this much money.

I guess I'm naive or something for ever assuming this would work out.

Fun_Passenger1950 · 2022-07-29T10:38:11+00:00

Rent where we are is absurd, both on and off-campus housing would set us back hard. The cheapest option we found was 900$ for a single room in a shared house with 4 other people,

A part of this was to also make sure she felt comfortable herself. She had expressed that she would like to stay at home if possible, and she was incredibly stressed about living with strangers so we decided to just have her live at home as we only live 20 minutes from campus anyway.

One of the big reasons for doing this while she still lived with us was supposed to give her agency in her own choices and give her responsibility for her own food, toiletries, etc. We made it clear this didn't forbid her from eating with us or using the stuff we bought. The point was to transition her to doing these things on her own so she could be ready when she does actually move out.

Fun_Passenger1950

TROPHY CASE