Quick question: Would you spend almost three-fourths of your annual income on one party?
Yeah, me neither. But some people will spend that much – or more – on their nuptials.While researching a wedding article for MSN Money Frugal Nation, I learned that:
Do the math.
Incidentally, that average wedding price does not include the cost of a honeymoon.
A single-mom blogger who goes by “Mutant Supermodel” is stressing over the holiday. She’d saved to buy gifts, but when her husband quit paying child support she had to spend every dime to keep herself and her three kids afloat.
It isn’t that MS fears there will be no Christmas. It’s that she fears she won’t be the one giving it.
“My kids are blessed with a large, loving extended family who will surely shower them with gifts the way they do at every special occasion,” she writes in a post called “$tre$$.”
“I know they don’t need or even want more stuff but I want to give it to them.”
Yet she doesn’t want to become part of the “relentless consumerism that so deeply affects this country.” Her compromise: Make some of her gifts, and limit the children’s Santa lists to that old favorite, “something I want, something I need, something to wear, something to read.”
“I think it’s better this way than a free for all,” MS concluded.
Me too – and I say that as someone who’s feeling the same contradictory clash of emotions.
Would you spend 6% (or more) of your gross annual income to send your teen to the prom? A survey by Visa Inc. indicated that families earning less than $20,000 per year planned to shell out $1,200 for the annual school dance.
I don’t know what’s scarier: The fact that parents are willing to do this or the fact that kids think it’s necessary.
If I were you, I’d let him.
Yep, it’s early. I’m putting the Valentine’s Day giveaway up to allow plenty of time for the winner to receive the package and re-gift it.
That is, if the winner really wants to – the items range from the sublime to the ridiculous. All might be hard to turn loose once you see them.
Let’s start with the sublime: three new kinds of chocolate.
My great-nephew is 10 years old. I expect this is his last year of believing in Father Christmas. No doubt he’ll return to school on Jan. 3 saying, “Santa Claus brought me a Kinect and two of the ‘Heroes of Olympus” books!’ and some cynical fifth-grader will reply, “Dude, your mom bought those gifts.”
This year, though, he still believes. Witness the note he left on the kitchen table.
No, I am not kidding. Picture a 43-foot-tall artificial tree draped with more than $11 million worth of jewelry and precious stones.
If you want to get a closer look, you’ll have to travel to the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. But not too close a look — the tree has four guards.
The winner of the two subscriptions to All You magazine has been chosen, so if you didn’t hear from me it wasn’t you.
The response to the giveaway was so enthusiastic that I plan to do it again at some point — and in the meantime, the magazine is providing a little holiday consolation prize.
The 2011 Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition has come and gone in its usual whirlwind of oddity. Funny how it all seemed so normal at the time.
Last year I wrote about the auction in extensive detail. This year I decided to deliver scenes from the weekend as a series of tweets. I’m doing this because I need to get in the habit of posting more often on Twitter.
Note: This doesn’t change my conviction that no one should use the verb “tweet” unless he is, in fact, a bird.
I don’t bring this up to make you nervous about shopping. Instead, I want to point out that we all have choice about how – and whether – to buy.