Math lesson

Sparkle eats cafeteria food for lunch at school. She pays for lunch with a prepaid account and she just punches in her number when she gets to the cashier. When her balance gets low, I go online and put more money in her account using a credit card.

Sparkle normally gets whatever is on the menu for the day. However, every now and then she gets a hankering for some of the other stuff, like the cookies and ice cream they offer. Those extra items are "a la cart" items and cost extra. After the first time she got an ice cream, I had a little talk with her. She was free to get these extras whenever she wanted, but she must pay for them herself. She could charge them to the account to make things simpler at lunchtime, and then after she got home, she could reimburse me for them. Okay, that cut down on the overpriced lunch extras.

After a while, when Sparkle stopped reporting eating a la cart items, I stopped checking. And then her account go low, I went checked and turns out she had purchased a couple of extra items in the past week. Okay, so when she got home we talked about it. I pointed out the items she had purchased, and crossed out what she had already paid me for. Then I had Sparkle add up how much money she owed me. Then we checked how much money she she had available. Sparkle was currently rather low on cash, and she didn't have enough money to cover the cost of lunch extras. So, she paid me what she could, and I had her calculate her new balance.

It took Sparkle a couple of days to earn enough money to pay back for all the lunch extras, mostly because, between school and homework, she doesn't have much time for earning money. Each time she earned money, I would have her calculate her new balance and write it down. Sparkle was really good about using her spare time to earn money to pay me back, instead of running off to play. She finally got enough money to get completely out of debt by vacuuming out my car. She didn't like being in the garage by herself, so she got Glitter to keep her company. I suggested that she give Glitter some of her extra money as a thank-you gift for helping her earn the money.

All in all, I think that the experience was very educational for Sparkle. She got to learn about working to pay off debt. She got to learn about making purchasing choices. She got to do a bunch of math. And I got my car vacuumed out as well!

I don't think that Sparkle would look back on the experience as fondly as I do. She didn't like being in debt and the math wasn't fun.