…fun raising

Dear Grandma,
My homework tonight is a survey on your likes and interests. Please check: I like the following magazines, books, cards, fruit, cakes or pies. Have you yet purchased gifts for Christmas, Valentines, Halloween and Veterans Day, and could you sponsor me for the school hog-a-thon. Love, your ever-lovin', money-grubbing granddaughter.

Along with the school supply fees, I prepare for the club fees. Any child, however woefully talented, can find a club to fit their interests. Clubs are a pyramid scheme with their fees for membership, the uniform, competitions and fundraisers. The cost just builds and builds and I can’t help thinking that someone, somewhere must be benefiting.

Upon joining every language, music, sports, civic, and feel-good club and organization, the strange catalogs with purchase opportunities begin to arrive. Any connoisseur of designer chocolate hasn’t lived until they have sampled the fifty-dollar malted milk balls from a fundraiser catalog. These catalogs offer wrapping paper as pricy as gold flake, and thirty-dollar candles which somehow manage to melt their way into our home and our budget.

A person becomes more and more callus as the dunning letters add up, but the straw that sucks the last pound of flesh from the hemorrhaging hump of the camel is a fund-raiser for the fundraising group!

After the initial shake-down, come the fees for being a parent of a child belonging to a club, thereby becoming a “booster.” The vicious cycle of booster membership opportunities continue as fundraising is eclipsed by volunteer opportunities to help those who fundraise.

I know first-hand that parents are not the King Tut or Isis who sit at the top of these schemes, but somebody, somewhere is getting rich—and while the government may ultimately be at blame, it doesn’t seem to be having any effect on lowering the national debt.

To me,
I must make sure I pay the yearbook fee to give me a permanent record of all the things I fundraised for. Is it absolutely certain that I can’t write that fee off toward the cost of tax prep? Yikes, T.

When you take out that college loan, see if they can front a little money, say twelve years worth, so you can afford to raise them to college age.

Reality Bite: And I thought school was free to the public? Think of it as a vicious sign of a really healthy economy.