21-year-old college junior is home for spring break.
This afternoon she was borrowing a car to go to a dentist’s appointment.
A plumber’s van is parked in the middle of the driveway, essentially blocking either car out of our 2-car garage.
Daughter does not ask plumber to move, but instead, tries to squeeze between van and pole for basketball hoop.
In doing so, she drives 2 wheels off the concrete drive into a garden area, and snaps the driver’s side mirror off the car.
Car is approximately 6-year-old Toyota Matrix.
I assume the repair will be at least a couple hundred bucks.
How do you deal with this situation? Does she pay all? Part? None?
Do you change your approach regarding giving her pretty much free use of a car if available?
Although the cost of the repair is not insignificant, perhaps moreso is the hassle of arranging for the repair and such - which she won’t have to deal with as she goes back to school Sunday.
Why wouldn’t she pay for it? She’s an adult who damaged someone else’s property (quite stupidly, at that).
As to the price, she needs to pay the cost of getting it fixed. If you’re nice, you don’t have to charge her for your time, but you certainly can.
As to whether or not she could use the car in the future: I’d have a lengthy discussion with her about why she would ever think that was a good idea. I’m not sure if I’d let her drive my car again, because that’s quite the bonehead move.
I figured someone would come back with this brilliant statement. :rolleyes:
YMMV, but as long as I’m ponying up considerable bucks towards college for someone who regularly comes home where they stay rent-free and eat food I buy, the mere attainment of a particular birthday will not make them anything other than my kid.
I suspect she won’t learn the essential lesson here, which is to use the good judgment to take the extra time to ask the plumber to move his van regardless of how important your schedule seems at the time, unless made to pay for at least half. And I personally would not change policy regarding letting her use my car – it wasn’t a really egregious use of bad judgment, after all, more of a silly one – if she paid at least half. I would make this clear to her. The reason I’d go with half – well, she’s a student and I’m a soft touch when it comes to students, and probably the hardship created by paying the full freight would end up with her coming to you for money down the road anyway, if she has the kind of financial stress most students have.
You sum up my thoughts pretty well, G. To her credit, when it happened she told her mom, “I did something stupid, and I’ll pay for it.”
But to put it in full context, one thing we did over this spring break was go over her budget/finances, to impress upon her the need to budget and plan for the future. And when your kid tells you how she tries to keep her food budget down to some ridiculously meagre amount, I find it seems kinda harsh to ask her to give you the equivalent of her next year’s food budget …
And she’s got some savings, which she plans to use to get a car next year when she is student teaching. I guess I could put a bow on the mirror and say, “All ou need now is the rest of a car to go with this!”
Bottomline, I can well afford a couple hundred a heck of a lot easier than she. And, as you say, the important thing is that she learn to exercise better judgment. Also - almost as much of a pain as the $ is the hassle of getting it fixed.
My wife is calling around to see who will fix it when for how much.
At most I would make her pay half–but a better way would be to figure out some way for her to deal with the issue. Can she not make a few phone calls and make arrangements?
Does she come home often? The passenger side mirror isn’t critical–if she comes home every weekend, she can deal with this on weekends until it is fixed.
I think there has to be consequences–but given that she is a student, financial ones really won’t/don’t make sense in my opinion.
Just got word from the homefront - total repair $330. Looks like my KID just bought herself a mirror! Plus, we’ll see what she can do to clean up the garden area she drove over and probably do some extra chores - maybe a couple of loads of laundry - to cover our hassle of getting the repair done.
I think we had told her that we owed her around $900 for the rest of this semester. So we’ll just make that $570, and she can accommodate that into her budget however she wants.
Actually, I was glad it wasn’t more. Sometimes it seems like little repairs can be more expensive than I expect…
If the weather looks good next week, maybe I’ll have to take a day off work to get the repairs done - and stop by a golf course on the way home …
If the money is coming out of your pocket, then eventually she’s going to come to you for a $ 200 textbook. In the end it’s going to even out to where YOU pay for it. So might as well acknowledge it and move on.
I disagree with the idea that she won’t learn the lesson, I bet she already has. No one WANTS to knock the mirror off of the car.
Been there. I finally decided that it just didn’t make any sense to make a person pay when I was already paying everything for them. So I put some money in my child’s pocket then he pays someone else. Only you know if your child has the resources to pay the kind of money involved - perhaps she has some discretionary funds she can throw in, thereby giving up something she was saving toward? But if it just means you are going to have to give her an additional $200 spending money then what’s the point?
The real issue to me has always been who has to do the work. I’ve paid for a lot of broken house windows (soccer balls) and dented car fenders. The boys have to participate in the process, be there when workers arrive, drive the car to the repair shop and wait around, explain what happened, etc. They don’t like giving up their time for this stuff any more than I do.
Assuming there are some handyman/shade tree mechanic genes in the pool.
The car is old enough that you should be able to find a spare in a salvage yard for a reasonable price. And a toolkit can be had at WalMart for 20-30 bucks if you don’t already have them. Maybe a hundred bucks and all is good.
Sorry, happened with my 3 a couple of times, I never made them pay for minor stuff like that and they certainly couldn’t afford to pay for major things.
When I was sixteen a tire blew out on the family car when I was driving ( at a safe normal speed) and my parents tried to make me pay for the tire and the resulting damage to the car.
The next day I talked them out of it, though…and I was right…the tire blowout was either a total accident or a failure of maintenence on their part and it was a frightening experience…even though no one was hurt the car was careening around out of control on a heavily traveled road ( the blowout happened on an I-40 ramp ) and it was only sheer luck that no other vehicles were in my path.
I’d appreciate hearing you expand upon this if you would.
Were there any repercussions from such incidents?
What was your thinking that led you to handle it this way?
I don’t know about your kid, but I worked pretty much the entire time I was in college, and my parents were pretty well-off. I’d have expected to pay for something like that (within reason), assuming it was something dumb I did and not an out-and-out accident.
If it’s never happened before I would pay for it and just let it be known that the first one is free. If she’s fairly responsible she feels bad enough already.
Yeah I would hope that the lesson was learned when she got out of the car and saw what she did. I mean she’s 21, I would hope by that age she doesn’t need to get her allowance docked to understand the consequences of the situation.
I do think it’s perfectly reasonable to have her pay, I just don’t really see that as much of a teaching opportunity. Other than possibly having her figure out how to get a repair done with getting screwed on the price.
People make stupid mistakes. Make her pay for it. Take it in installments if you can afford it. I would not curtail the use of the car because she misjudged the situation. Unless she makes a habit of it ;). She sounds like she’s not trying to shirk her responsibilities. Done is done.
