The Weight of Money

In the past six months I have purchased 5 round-trip plane tickets. Sadly, despite these purchases, I’ve gone no where in the past six months. These tickets have been for the daughter, my mother, and now my sister. I’m used to buying tickets for my mom because she doesn’t have a credit/debit card and she sends me the money (usually right way, sometimes a couple weeks later). Obviously, I don’t mind buying tickets for the daughter, that’s a mother’s job — right? However, I’ve entered into new territory - I bought my sister a ticket so she could come to the wedding.

My sister struggles with money and managing money and I often have little sympathy for her. She waited until the last minute to get a ticket and was shocked at the high price. When she first asked if I could buy it and let her pay me back, I said no. I knew that the risk of not getting paid was too high and I wasn’t going to get sucked into that situation. Plus, I don’t use credit cards and all the money I spend comes directly from cash reserves, and with the wedding and the house, there isn’t much excess lying around.

However, the partner talked to me and got me to admit that I would really love to have her come out. He said he’d be willing to help buy the ticket if we could work something out. So, we found her a cheaper flight ($350 eeek — I paid $207 for my mom’s ticket last month) and I bought the ticket. But, with these conditions:

1. If she doesn’t pay, I will simply declare that it is a gift and not worry about it. I had to accept the fact that I know I probably won’t get paid for this and that it is more important to me to have her come out for the wedding than to worry about wether or not she paid me back.

2. She’ll send me $100 right away. This will help me feel more comfortable that she will indeed get on the plane and come out if she has spent cash on the ticket. She’ll then pay $100 from each paycheck until it is paid for.

Accepting that I just bought a ticket for her was the key point. I am now very excited that she will be coming and am not so concerned about the cash spent. Due to tax returns and such, it will not hurt me too much to lose the $300 on the ticket and so I can avoid worrying about that and just look forward to seeing her when she gets here.

However, I still feel that I should get some benefit out of all these plane tickets that I keep buying. Oh well!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 4:18 pm and is filed under family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.