Charging an 18-year-old in high school rent

[wickerwoman]

82. Yeah.

I can see asking adult kids who aren't in school and are still living at home to contribute to the household fund but I'd set it at 30% of their take-home rather than some arbitrary number like $200 a week.

I think it's crazy to ask a kid who is still in high school to cut back on study hours and extracurricular activities and volunteer work which looks good on a college application to spend that time flipping burgers for minimum wage.

It's important to teach kids the importance of hard work, but it's equally important to teach them the value of their time. When I was in college I turned down unpaid internships and summer study abroad opportunities to be a cashier at a supermarket, a hardware store and a drug store. Some people might say I was learning the value of hard work, but really if I had taken the unpaid internship I would have made better networking connections, pushed myself to my potential and gotten more experience that was relevant to the kind of work I ended up doing as a career. In the long term, I would have made heaps more money getting a better job off of summer internship work experience than I got off of 3 months doing check-out.