By Guest Blogger Lindsay Blanche
Did your mother ever tell you to keep some “mad money” around just in case? Mine did, and hers was in the bottom drawer, towards the back of her small jewelry box. Relatively speaking, it was not a lot of money. I believe it was anywhere between two and four hundred dollars, depending on the time of the year. But the important thing was that it was a secret from my dad. Even though she frequently dipped into this fund to buy the holiday and birthday gifts for my dad, she never told him it was there.
My mother was a wife at the age of 18, and was married to my dad for forty years. This was a long time before separate checking accounts were a common thing, and she would never have considered not consulting him on a major purchase. So, the concept of her hiding money from him was a VERY big deal.
