Ice Cream

I had a hankering for soft serve again tonight....chocolate dip vanilla cone. Now, the best soft serve in town is Fosters Freeze. Assume we live at ....say....Negative 15th street. Fosters Freeze is around Positive 30th Street. It's a long, long way from our house - and with gas so high, I'm really trying hard to limit the driving I do for 'non-essential' activities. So I went to Baskin Robbins which is about a mile away in the same shopping center as our closest grocery store.

I splurged and had a double scoop chocolate chip ice cream hot fudge sundae. It was supposed to be a double scoop chocolate chip with hot fudge AND marshmallow - but their marshmallow sauce was frozen - so I get extra hot fudge instead. I didn't feel too guilty because I skipped the whip cream and the nuts. And, I shared the sundae with B. and J. who enjoyed it also. So I technically only had 1/3 of a splurge...so I can have another splurge sometime this weekend. The next splurge will most likely be a true FF soft serve chocolate dip - the sundae was good but I would have enjoyed the cone just as much and the cost of the sundae was pretty much what I would have spent on gasoline and the cone. So I'll call it even next time and drive across town to get what I'm craving.

The drive-thru dinner was terrific - it was a fund raiser for the pregnancy resource center here in town and a lot of local churches sold tickets. From the look of the line at just after the kick-off time, I'd say it was pretty successful. We got a dinner of ribs, chicken, slaw, beans and dinner roll for $11 each. It was great! And easy. I hope they do it again - it was a nice 'dinner out' without having to get out of our car - just drive through, pick it up and bring it home. Delicious!

B. got his first paycheck today and we're taking him to the bank tomorrow to show him how to deposit the check into his savings account (which he's had since he was a baby though he didn't really know it) and get 'cash back'. Trying to encourage him to save as much as he can - the agreement is 30/30/40 split: 30% to us to help with car expenses; 30% to savings for college; and 40% for him for whatever. This first check, we're skipping our percentage so he'll have a little more cash - we'll do that for the next check or two. And then we'll start taking our percentage - but I will just save it....so he'll end up saving 60% for college, hopefully. That's what we're going to try to do - and I hope we can manage it. He realized that we've had this account for a long time - we make monthly automatic transfers into the account and take out sometimes, for things like Christmas, vacations, etc. So he said 'no offense, but how will I know that you're not taking out money from my account to buy a refrigerator or something?'. I showed him how I entered his deposit (net of the cash) into the account register, showing it as 'Save Mart' so we'll know where the $$ came from. And I reassured him that any Save Mart money is HIS and only his, though the intent is that money he deposits into this account is earmarked primarily for college savings. Though of course, if he has a need for a 'thing' that he wants to buy, we'll talk about it and he can withdraw money from the account. But we're really trying hard to get him used to NOT thinking about this account as a 'cash' account. When he needs access to some of his cash, we'll open a checking account for him.

I reminded B. that he has finished paying his phone off, so he'll get allowance this weekend. He said 'do I even really need to get an allowance anymore'? I replied 'yes, because you'll need cash - but maybe we'll let you start buying your own lunches at school' (thus adding another $20 per week to his college savings, if I can be disciplined enough to do that) and confirmed that yes, he will still need to do chores. It will be hugely helpful to our budget to have him be able to pay his own entertainment expenses, some of his clothing expenses, etc. Teens are expensive and the regular incoming cold, hard cash his job is bringing in will be a nice change to our ever increasing monthly outflow.