Dear Jeanne & Leonard:
I’m troubled by the way some of my husband’s friends treat him. “Bill” and I have been married for three years. It’s a second marriage for both of us, and it’s a good one. But here’s the problem: After college, Bill worked as a stockbroker before quitting to pursue his passion, furniture-making. While he now earns a good living building custom-made pieces, he doesn’t make nearly as much as some of his old buddies from the brokerage industry. They remain friends, though, and he allows them to regularly treat him to things like golf trips to North Carolina and premium seats to Yankees and Rangers games, often with a night at a New York City hotel thrown in. Bill happily accepts their generosity and feels no obligation to reciprocate. He says these are old friends who enjoy the pleasure of his company, who know that the only way he can join them at these events is if they pick up the tab and who can easily afford to do so. I think, however, that they’re treating him as if he were a charity, and that that’s not very flattering. What do you think?
— Uncomfortable in New England
Dear Uncomfortable:
No wonder you feel uncomfortable. Not only are Bill’s friends treating him as if he were a charity, he’s acting like one. But that said, if your husband is comfortable accepting expensive freebies from his old friends, and if you’re not expected to be a participant in the outings they bankroll — if you’re not, that is, put in the position of accepting their charity yourself — we suggest you let this go. While so uninhibitedly accepting his friends’ largesse does not reflect well on your earning-a-good-living husband, the fondness his friends must feel for him certainly does.
Dear Jeanne & Leonard:
I’m afraid our youngest daughter is becoming a tightwad. Relatives often give each of our daughters cash on their birthdays, holidays and other special occasions. Our 10-year-old, “Sophia,” salts this money away until she needs it to buy something special for herself, while our 12-year-old, “Alyssa,” usually blows her money on clothes as soon as she gets it. My husband and I are proud of Sophia for being a saver, and we wish her sister were a little less grasshopper and a little more ant. But recently Alyssa told us she’d asked Sophia to lend her $25 so she could buy her best friend a birthday present, and Sophia turned her down. I was horrified; I want my kids to be generous with each other. Moreover, I know Sophia has that $25 (and plenty more), and her sister wants the loan for something worthwhile. I believe my husband and I should talk to Sophia about the virtues of generosity and ask her to lend Alyssa the money, but he disagrees. Who’s right?
— Heather, Connecticut
Dear Heather:
Are you ready to co-sign the loan? We’re not kidding.
Look, it’s one thing to encourage Sophia to be generous. We’re all for that. But it’s quite another to ask her to bail out her spendthrift sister. Surely Alyssa knew her friend’s birthday was on the horizon. If she’s out of cash and unable to buy the girl a gift, you should be using the moment to teach Alyssa about saving, not Sophia about generosity.
One more thing: If you encourage your daughters to believe that, in life, the sister who’s out of money automatically has a claim on the resources of the sister who’s saved some, you’ll be doing both of your children a disservice.
Dear Jeanne & Leonard:
When I recently went with friends to hear a band we like, I took along one of the band’s old CDs and had a couple of the members sign it after the show. My friends disapproved. They said that the band had come out into the lobby to sell and sign their latest release and that if I wanted their autographs, I should have bought the new CD. Can they be right? They called me a cheapskate.
— A.B., Berkeley, California
Dear A.B.:
Unless you took up so much of the band’s time that you interfered with their CD sales, you did nothing wrong. After all, the fact that you didn’t buy your CD that night doesn’t mean the band failed to receive a royalty on the CD they signed for you. Where and when you bought it makes no difference. In short, you paid to see them play, and you paid for a CD, hence you did nothing wrong in asking for autographs.
P.S. to your companions: Bands who sell and sign merchandise in club lobbies love fans who like them enough to want to get old CDs signed. Their name for these folks isn’t “cheapskate,” it’s “paying customer.”
P.S. to you: Bands love fans who buy their latest CD even more.
Dear Jeanne & Leonard:
My wife’s grandfather spent most of his career working for Hewlett-Packard, a company he revered. A year before he died, he asked my wife to promise she would never sell the block of HP stock he intended to leave her. That was over 15 years ago, and she has faithfully kept her promise to him. Meanwhile, the stock has lost more than half its value. Isn’t there a moral statute of limitations on promises like this? Would it be so wrong for my wife to sell the stock before she loses any more money?
— Increasingly Frustrated, Walnut Creek, California
Dear I.F.:
How would you feel if you left money to a granddaughter for her college education, and she later decided her inheritance was better spent traveling through South America, learning about the people and their cultures?
The point is, considering breaking a promise puts you on a slippery slope, where one person’s “good reason” is another person’s tortured rationalization. We happen to think your wife has a pretty good excuse for selling her stock —namely, that Hewlett Packard is an altogether different company than it was when Grandpa left the shares to her. In particular, it’s no longer the blue-chip company he presumably imagined it always would be.
But to answer your question: The statute of limitations on a promise never runs out. However, sometimes times change, and justifiable reasons for breaking one can emerge. Whether that’s what has occurred here only your wife can decide.
P.S. Taking the pledge not to sell didn’t earn your wife a larger share of Grandpa’s stock than she’d have otherwise gotten, did it? Because if that’s the case, and she wants to part with the stock but not her honor, she needs to begin by giving the appropriate number of shares to those beneficiaries whom her promise in effect shortchanged.
