Ten Money Questions for Denise Tanton

Nina Smith — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:42:46 -0500

In this week’s Ten Money Questions, we speak with Denise Tanton. Denise is the BlogHer Community Manager which means she corrals the contributing editors into a cohesive group of bloggers that you see posting daily. She writes for the Health & Wellness category and keeps a couple of personal blogs: Flamingo House Happenings and Fast Times @ Homeschool High.

She lives in Florida with a colorful personal life so of course I wanted to hear what lively thoughts she had about money. Enjoy!

1. You and your partner have six children. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. What’s your personal philosophy around spending, saving and living within your means?
It is a lot of mouths to feed and that makes it easy to actually have a personal philosophy about spending and living within our means. We don’t have a choice because I really hate being in debt.

2. What is your most significant memory about money?
This is the hardest question, Nina. I’m not sure I have one really significant memory about money. I just always seemed to know that my family didn’t have a lot of it. We always had food and clothing and I don’t remember my parents fighting over money or fretting over it - I just somehow knew that we didn’t have money for big ticket items that some of my friends had. I’m not sure how I knew it, but I did.

I will also mention once when I was probably in the 3rd grade my mom sent me to the 7-11 in the front of our sub-division to buy a loaf of bread. She gave me a ten dollar bill. Being a normal child, I wandered around the candy aisle, trying to decide what to buy with the change in my pocket. I was there quite some time and when I went to the counter to pay for my candy and the bread - the $10 was missing! I looked everywhere and never found it. I rode home knowing I was going to be in big trouble - and I was. I don’t think I’ve ever “lost” money since then. Heh. (As a side note, the clerk did find the $10 and he held it for me to retrieve. I’ve always been surprised that he didn’t pocket it.)

3. What is your worst habit around finances?
My worst habit is probably giving too much away - to family members and to charities. If I have money, I have a hard time holding on to it - others need it more than I do which means when a rainy day arrives, I’m not very likely to have a reserve to pull from.

4. I understand that you home school your high school daughter. What sort of lessons teaches her to be proficient with finances?
When we first started homeschooling, at the end of 8th grade, we spent a month working on an entrepreneur program. Creating a business model, talking about all of the things a person has to do to start a business and run it. From there we wandered in and out of the world of personal finance. Any time we discuss race or gender issues, whether it’s a social studies unit or due to a book or piece of poetry, we also discuss “class”. Money is everywhere, it’s behind everything, and being aware of that helps a teenager adopt her own ideas about how to spend and save and donate money.

5. On one post, you linked to a fun survey that revealed you have a good chance of being a multimillionaire. How did you acquire this knack for money?
Dumb luck? Family inheritance? Or maybe we should ask KT since she did my chart during the BlogHer Con “Un-Conference”.

6. At BlogHer07, you mentioned to me that some of your kids are spenders and some are savers. What influences the spenders to be spenders? And as a parent, is there really anything you can do to convince them to save?
I think, with my children in particular, that many of the personal finance decisions are related to self-image and self-confidence. The children who spend, spend, spend are the ones who seem to be searching for something that they haven’t yet found. The ones who save have all of the traditional kid angst but underneath they’re the most happy with who they are and their direction in life.

7. What’s your opinion on allowances?
My opinion on allowance is that I have no opinion. I have never found a model that works and I’ve given up trying.

I’ve tried the $1 per year - so a 10 year old gets $10 and I've tried the pay based on extra jobs around the house and I’ve tried a flat, arbitrary rate. I’ve tried having kids write me a proposal providing me with a list of their spending and savings needs. Nothing has ever worked well.

The only thing I know for sure about allowance is that you should always encourage the child to save a percentage, donate a percentage and the rest should be his/hers to spend on anything they wish to spend it on.

8. Do you and your partner see eye-to-eye on money?
Ha. For the most part, we do. She’s prone to extravagant gift giving and I am so totally not. She’s worked on curbing that instinct and I’ve worked on being accepting of her need to do this every now and again.

9. On a BlogHer post about soldiers and debt, you commented that many military spouses head out shopping to fill what’s missing in their lives. Does buying and consuming fill the boredom and loneliness or just exasperate the problem?
Both. Military spouses live a difficult life. Spending, shopping, consuming, owning really can fill that empty spot, and relieve the stress - temporarily. That emptiness comes back, and so does the stress and it can come back with a vengeance.

And of course, those habits, those coping mechanisms can appear in the children of service members as well. Military children have very similar reactions to loss and stress. If you spend any time at all on a military installation, in military family housing, you’ll see kids with the latest and greatest toys - these children live in homes where their active duty parent is paid just above the poverty level and you wouldn’t know it by looking at them or watching them play. It isn’t just the military spouses who fill a need through shopping and ownership, it’s the children as well.

10. What are your plans for retirement?
I’m not retiring, are you crazy? And I’m only half-joking here. I can’t picture retirement. I can’t wrap my head around how to get to the point where I can retire. I look at my IRA and my bank account and just shake my head. Ask me again in five years, maybe I’ll have worked it out by then.

More about Denise Tanton
Forty-something mom Denise lives in Florida with her partner and their children. When she’s not busy homeschooling her teen or working, she can be found driving “mom’s taxi” for smiles and cash.

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Read other interviews in Nina’s Ten Money Questions series at Queercents.

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Ten Money Questions for Denise Tanton