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Originally Posted by BigV
As for the ideas you talked about, I like the idea of helping her get some experience. I feel you left out the cliche' of real estate, location location location. Location truly matters.
Does she have a job or a school currently? Or lined up? Or hopeful for? Living close to the other main thing in her life makes a biiig difference. SonofV has a place, a shared bedroom, and he walks to work. He doesn't drive, so access to transit, or shank's mare is imperative.
I also think the experience of living with another person of the same age/situation (ish) has tremendous potential for encouraging the growth you're looking for. Roommates, you learn a LOT about life when you have roommates, amirite?
I think there's nothing to be gained by deliberately choosing a place with daylight roaches. Teach her to hate being there maybe. I don't think that's what you're going for.
Lots of stuff is nicer than back in the day. Cars. Appliances. Practically every kind of technology. I don't think that's a ... useful measure. There truly is benefit to be had in the experience of having a place that you want to work your way out of, unquestionably. If you are trying to optimize her learning curve to learn to shift for herself, especially economically, make that part easy for her to do by getting some place close to work so getting good at work so she can get good at getting (fungible) money will facilitate her getting good at all the other stuff she (and you) want her to get good at.
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She has a job, and the $935 (super nice) place is about 5 minutes from it--she could walk there if she really had to, but it's on the highway. It's a 475 sq.ft. efficiency/studio though, so sharing with a roommate would be very intimate. At any rate, it's where she's going to end up. Mr. Clod is going there in person today to negotiate with them about how many months we'd have to pay upfront in order to start receiving discounts on the year as a whole. Is rent a thing you can negotiate like that? He seems to think it is. I don't care as long as I don't have to be involved in the negotiating, I can't handle crap like that.
The quality of her job, however, is what worries me. She works in low-level retail for $8 an hour, part-time only because they don't want to pay health insurance on any of their employees. No one would give her a full-time job. You may recall from my woes here how hard it was to get her a job in the first place. And she's doing fine at it, from what we can tell at least--she actually had two part-time jobs for awhile, but got fired from one. But even if they put her at full-time at her current payscale, she couldn't afford this place. She has to get up to a really-real job within a year, with both full-time hours and a better wage, or we're stuck paying for this apartment indefinitely. Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and she'd be solid. Oh, except this apartment complex (and all others that we've seen) requires you to make 3x the rent in order to get approved. So even $15 still wouldn't be enough if she were doing this on her own.
Or she could decide to go to college... which...
She's smart enough by a long shot to go to college, but is
seriously burnt out on anything academic and very nearly failed her senior year of high school subconsciously-on-purpose just to show her mother how hard she wanted her to fuck off. (Still graduated like 6th in her class overall, if you want proof of how the honors-class-grade-inflation scam works.) The question of college still sends her into a panic attack. Personally I'm fine with non-college career paths, as long as she's happy and self-sufficient in life. Her father is not. His goal was for this to be a more traditional "gap year," to get her shit together enough for the confidence to start college next fall, but he has now accepted that this is unlikely.
She's going to be paying her own electric, internet, gas, food, washer-dryer rental--basically everything except rent, and hopefully some of rent too, if we can swing it. We want every dollar accounted for. But still, I fear this will play out as a year of her working part-time and playing video games the rest of the time and when the year is up we'll all be back where we are right now.