Patricia Heaton Quotes

Kids don't come cheap.

Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children's needs. That decision can be most shortsighted.

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

I got a wife who likes expensive things, so she takes all the cash.

I am one of those for whom superfluity is a necessity.

Giving kids whatever they ask for is disastrous parenting. There's no sense of something earned. I'm sorry, but when you're 12, you don't need a new cell phone every few months just because a new one comes out.

When you have a kid, money matters.

In Los Angeles, parenting is a competitive sport. From Beverly Hills baby boutiques to kids' yoga classes, L.A. fuses high style, industrial-strength materialism, and parental outsourcing into our own unique version of child-rearing.

When you have children, you can't say you're not interested in money.

I don't over-gift. I don't inundate my child with a lot of things.

You have a kid, and it's like, 'He's gotta go to college! Gotta have some clothes!'

I have more than 100 pairs of Jimmy Choos and I feel very guilty about it.

I feel I'm fortunate compared with a lot of parents in being able to afford a nanny but, you know, it's expensive. When we've looked into trying to find a full daycare place in London it's just been impossible. You just cannot get one.

If advertising encourages people to live beyond their means, so does matrimony.

I spoke to my dad, and he said it took close to 90 dollars to raise me. But that was me and my sister, and my sister moved out when she was 16, so sometimes it can knock you up to triple digits to raise a kid.

Possessions are a way of turning money into problems.

My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!

I'm not against people having new cars. I'm against them having you. We spend a tremendous amount impressing somebody at the stoplight who we'll never meet. It makes you broke and keeps you broke.

Nobody's about saving anymore. No one cares about a rainy day anymore. Nobody saves up enough for even an umbrella for a rainy day. It's sad. It really is a new form of slavery. We used to work to be able to afford material things. Now we work for these things. They're the boss. That house you can't afford, that car that's out of your price range, that cellphone that drains your bank account - that's your boss.

Every time I think about changing a diaper, I run a little bit harder and a little bit faster to make sure I can afford a nanny until my daughter's old enough to take care of that herself.

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.

Modern man drives a mortgaged car over a bond-financed highway on credit-card gas.

My whole thing in life is I just want freedom. I thought that money would give me that freedom. I was wrong. It bound me more than it freed me, because now I had more things to worry about, more people asking for money, I thought I had to buy a house and nice cars and different things that people with money are supposed to do.

Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

I wasn't big in the party scene but I did have an excessive lifestyle. I had much more than I needed. I think that was a manifestation of a certain kind of mental illness.