If you want proof that women are still treated as chattel in the Middle East, send your daughter to a seminary. These bastions of higher learning have replaced the dowry of yesteryear with a promise that if you give them your money, your daughter will move to the head of the eligibility line.
It is an incredible system that has figured out how to convert our worst fears (the 38-year-old spinster still living in the basement) into a lucrative money making machine. The asking price begins in the high teen-thousands which includes a bed, a roof and a camp-issued mattress. Food is somewhat Spartan with most schools providing one meal a day.
Admittedly, when compared with the costs of a year of Ivy League partying, this is quite a bargain. Especially if they deliver on their promise to save my big girl the heartache of months of speed-dating, cheap drinks overlooking the harbor and fossilized conversations with young men who are just a few years past playing with Legos.
So why the gripes? I suppose it isn’t the published price that is gnawing at me as it is the “…er oh…Didn’t you read about this in the handbook?” comments that each come with little price tags. This is sounding more like a wedding already! Whats a few more bucks when you’ve spent thousands already?
Like a trip to the Dollar Store, I am scratching my head wondering how a few cheap items could possibly amount to such a bill.
Here is a brief look at week number one:
The school requires our girl to lease a cell phone through an exclusive provider who, no doubt, offers a lucrative kickback for this monopoly. The basic plan costs $44 a month (not counting 16% VAT) and comes with a generous 500 minutes and an insurance plan. But they ALSO require you pay them a $199 deposit for the phone which just might be refunded if you smile the right way and return the phone without a nick or ding. What exactly the insurance plan covers is as mysterious as some of the meat dinners she will consume.
If she wants to unpack her bags she needs to pay a $100 security deposit for the room. Which, by the way, does not come standard with window screens or a plunger. Will there be mold and damp on those walls come year end? Pretty likely if you ask me.
Should she opt to do laundry, and what eighteen year old girl wouldn’t, she has to fork over $75 for the privilege of using the machines. Soap and dryer sheets are optional.
Then there are book fees. You simply cannot be successful unless you have the right study guides which just so happen to be published by the teachers who teach those same courses. Kaching!! And another $40 vanishes into the school’s pocket.
We know that weeks two and three will bring the first of many care packages from the states (Note to world: Israel has not discovered peanut butter, or so I gather), and the dreaded cell phone bill which is going to be astronomical as they always are.
When all is said and done, these next ten months will tally up close to twenty-two thousand dollars.
And so, with good reason, I am very much feeling like I am investing a wedding just to make a wedding (I mean a cheap one, no Vera Wang dresses, no fresh flowers or bar and a one-man-band).
Then there are daughters two and three….
The good word for today is: To borrow a recent quote from a respected physician regarding the oft heard claim that: “America spends more per capita on health care than any other nation” – “What else would you like to spend your money on? More shirts? A nicer car??”
Make it Last
Posted October 31, 2009 by Lee LowensteinCategories: Commentary, Marriage, Self-Help
Tags: Anorexia, Birthday, Cash, Consumerism, Death, Gifts, Money, Value
I recently celebrated a BIG birthday (not 30 or 50), you can guess. To honor the occasion, my parents gave me a generous cash gift with clear instructions to spend it on something of lasting value. Not food, clothes for the kids or paying bills; a “collectible” for life’s great photo album.
I put a lot of thought into what might fit this description. Here is what I came up with (either or, not all):
1. Fly to Colorado and spend a week knocking off a few more Fourteeners with a hiking buddy
2. Set myself up with a good pair of skis and a season pass to a local mountain
3. Finally get a zero degree sleeping bag and some up-to-date gear and bust out of the house for two weeks on the AT
4. A year of guitar lessons to fix bad habits picked up along the past twenty-five years of hacking, and learning how to solo like a pro
What a year this was going to be! Money is one of those things that liberates the mind and creates a feeling of broad expansiveness; of endless possibilities. What a gift!…..
You know where this one is heading….don’t you.
It wasn’t one of those “Man plans and G-d laughs” sort of things; one way or another, none of these grand ideas came to fruition. Oh, I did spend the money in the end, but on pedestrian items of pressing need; just not groceries.
I am not without some degree of understanding. Obviously, you simply cannot be the father to seven children and husband of a working woman and pull off numbers one and three. Desiring those was a desperate attempt to hold on to a younger, more mobile me. Its a struggle I deal with fairly often, the balance between responsibility for myself and those who depend on me. I suppose I will eventually grow up and take it in stride. Maybe.
What really bothers me is that I couldn’t pull the trigger on the other, more obtainable items. I am afraid there are more unpleasant forces at work there that pervade my whole relationship with money.
For starters, I have a difficult time spending money, especially on myself. Having subsisted for years paycheck to paycheck I’ve developed a condition that I call “Wallet Anorexia”; an illness whose symptom features constantly second-guessing each purchase.
“Do I really need a new pair of shoes? Nobody will notice the hole in the bottom of these…so long as I shuffle my feet when walking.”
“I’m not that hungry. It’s what….? Forty minutes until I get home?
What is so strange is how selectively this disorder shows itself. I can spend like a drunken sailor on others; it is doing what I need for myself that is such a drain. Why should that be? Most people tend to be generous with themselves and cheap to others. That really puzzles me.
What I have often wondered, and I hope not to be true, is that I simply cannot attach value to things. Not to say that I can’t distinguish a jalopy from a Rolls, but even in that scenario, what is it really worth if one day I will be dead and unable to use it? If so, why bother spending money on it in the first place?
Wow! Am I really so morbid?
Sounds like a question for Dr. Jones, just not Indiana.
The good word for today is: Give yourself permission to do fun things that you enjoy. You only live once.
LJ
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