It’s expensive to keep the house warm during the frigid winter cold snaps
I don’t think my kids have a good concept of money for being in middle school.
It’s not like I had some kind of unrealistic understanding of economics when I was 13 by comparison, but at the same time I didn’t insist on pressing my parents all the time to spend exorbitant amounts of money on trivial “wants,” not “needs.” Don’t tell me that you want a brand new iPhone this year simply because the new model has more camera lenses than the brand new one you received for your birthday the year prior.
Even when I tell my kids that we’re struggling financially and we need to be conservative about our wants and needs for the time being, they still don’t get it. I’m worried that when they all get their licenses that they’ll want cars by default. Now that the weather is getting increasingly colder by the week, we are running the furnace more than ever before. They all want the house to be as warm as a sauna, but they don’t understand how much money it costs to do this on an hour by hour basis. Sometimes they will try to change the thermostat settings when they think I’m not looking, so that’s why I went out and bought a plastic lock box to put over the top of my HVAC thermostat. If my wife or I want to adjust the temperature in the house, one of us can do this individually. The colder it gets, the more and more they will all want the heat on even if we can’t afford to run it to that degree.