How do you afford a simcha (offshoot of afford life)?

chen

Mon, Jul 17 2006, 12:47 pm

mali wrote:

All the checks were made out to us, his parents.

most 8-day-olds do not yet have a bank account in their name, and some banks will give you a hard time if you try to deposit in your account a check with s/o else's name on it. (for goodness sake, when we got wedding gifts before the wedding made out to Mr & Mrs Levi Minsky, the bank would not let us deposit them b/c at that point I was still Chen Ginzberg and there was no such person as Mrs. Levi Minsky. they wouldn't even let us open an account in the name of M/M Minsky. we had to wait till after the wedding when we had a marriage certificate to prove that we were married.)

I think most ppl are assuming you will use the $ to do s/t for the child and are giving you $ b/c you know what he needs better than they do. Few ppl are thinking their gift will go to pay for the affair.

chen

Mon, Jul 17 2006, 12:53 pm

Only one family we know made a fairly lavish bris, that is to say a sit-down milchik brunch for the entire shul by an outside caterer in the shul's catering hall. But this was a very special case of a multiple birth after many, many years of marriage and was a way of saying "thank you" to Hashem, the way someone might make a kiddush to commemorate some nes that happened to him. ( some of the Holocaust survivors in the shul make a major kiddush evry year on the anniversaries of their liberation from concentration camps.) otherwise this family lives very simply.

mali

Mon, Jul 17 2006, 1:51 pm

chen wrote:

when we got wedding gifts before the wedding made out to Mr & Mrs Levi Minsky, the bank would not let us deposit them b/c at that point I was still Chen Ginzberg and there was no such person as Mrs. Levi Minsky.

mali

Mon, Jul 17 2006, 1:55 pm

chen wrote:

mali wrote:

All the checks were made out to us, his parents.

most 8-day-olds do not yet have a bank account in their name

my husband got a bond on his name when he was born. to this day, my in-laws can't find it. too bad the money wasn't used right then.

and if you want to get technical and say the checks went to cover the cost of the bris you can. so then we used our salaries to buy his diapers and clothing. Rolling Eyes

you can make it sound better and say we used our salaries to cover the bris and the gift money to buy things for the baby. fact is, we didn't get half as much money for our girl, or for a bris that we didn't invite that many guests to, so I guess the money comes along with a big affair. Tongue Out

chen

Mon, Jul 17 2006, 1:59 pm

mali wrote:

chen wrote:

We can laugh now but it wasn't funny then. Some ppl send gifts weeks and weeks before the wedding, and we had to hang on to those checks--which wasn't fair to the gift-givers. In every TY note I had to explain that the check would be some time in coming back b/c we would not be able to deposit it till after the wedding.

Oh, BTW, that is why I now make out checks to "Channa Gordon and/or Yisroel Blucher"--plus you never know, kalloh could be keeping her own name.

Motek

Fri, Aug 11 2006, 4:42 pm

mali wrote:

my husband got a bond on his name when he was born. to this day, my in-laws can't find it. too bad the money wasn't used right then.

don't you have to wait X number of years before you cash it in anyway?

mali

Sat, Aug 12 2006, 2:23 pm

Motek wrote:

mali wrote:

my husband got a bond on his name when he was born. to this day, my in-laws can't find it. too bad the money wasn't used right then.

don't you have to wait X number of years before you cash it in anyway?

Sure you do! But it would have been wiser to give a check to his parents for the same amount of money they spent on that bond. They wanted to be "fair" and give this money to the person who this affair is for, but instead, noone got to use it.