I thought long and hard about whether to post this because I know some of you will be shaking your head right now and thinking how bad it is that my teenage daughter has two designer handbags. I bet lots of you will have your finger hovering over the cross on the right hand side of the page ready to move on to something that really is frugal rather than this ‘waste of money’ and that’s OK.
But I’d rather you stayed to listen to why I’m proud and why it really isn’t a bad thing.
((This post may contain affiliate links – I’m just putting it out there so you know. You pay the exactly the same price but I’ll get a few pennies too)
I’m going to start by being completely open with you – Miss Frugal gets £50 a month pocket money which works out to a little over £10 a week. She gets it on a set day every month (my payday) and she’s never asked for an advance or a loan because she knows the answer would be No.
We don’t pay her extra to do jobs around the house because that’s a given in our family, you make the mess, you help tidy it up and you eat the food so you take your turn cooking it. They both have daily jobs that they’re expected to do which are just simple tasks and weekly jobs which take them a bit longer and whilst they don’t do them with a smile of their face and a spring in their step, the jobs get done with minimal moaning usually so I can’t complain.
She has the chance to earn extra money babysitting but I don’t want her to get an actual job at her age as I’d rather she focused on school and being a teenager. I do pay her to do some work for me occasionally with a few blogging tasks but apparently I don’t pay well for what’s expected of her and I’m ‘too fussy’ so that doesn’t happen too often these days.
On the whole, she’s a good girl who has lots of friends and is doing well at school where she’s predicted to get mostly A’s when she leaves in two years.
I’m telling you all that partly to justify the next part of this post and partly because I’m an extremely proud Mum. 😉
Back to my main point…..
At 15 years old, she has two designer handbags – one Michael Kors that she bought from the York Designer Outlet and one Kate Spade that she treated herself to in Bicester Village last month.
She bought them both herself using the money that she saved from her pocket money and that she earned from babysitting and the odd job for me on the blog – how amazing is that for a 15 year old. She knows that if she wants something expensive (which she usually does) then she needs to save and work to be able to pay for it.
And that’s a lesson that a lot of us grown-ups could do with learning.
Neither of the bags were impulse purchases and she did plenty of research online using one of her favourite sites Lyst, before buying them so she knew what was a good deal and what just looked like a good deal – you know where the RRP is ridiculously high but no-one actually sells the item for that much. She knew when she saw the bag she loved in Kate Spade that she’d seen similar online for more than double so she was over the moon that she had enough money in her purse to be able to buy it!
The point of this post wasn’t to get into whether designer handbags are a waste of money or not because no matter what we think, she wanted to buy the bags so she did something about it.
She made it happen!
You might also like:
Five places to buy designer handbags for less
How we saved for New York
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