What $2.79 a Week Taught Me About Risk
It started with a letter I nearly deleted.
For years, my daughter's primary School received a payment from me of $2.79 a week.
Sometimes it was $12.
Sometimes there were several in the same week, each one tagged to a different School thing.
I'd been a single parent for a long time. I earned good money as an Office Manager, but running a house on one income was still tight.
I wanted my daughter to know that coming from a single-parent home didn't have to mean missing out. If it mattered, you found a way. You did your research, thought outside the box, and asked for what you needed. We prayed a lot too.
So I didn't budget week to week, or even month to month. At the start of each year, I looked at the whole year. School fees. Trips. Sports fees and uniforms.
Church activities. Dance lessons. The yearly School camp was always the big one, and by damn she was going. I started paying for camp before the school had even set the fee.
Then I split everything into weekly amounts and paid it off as we went. These days I do the reverse, with 20 to 30 savings buckets. Back then, I needed the money gone and allocated, before life found another use for it.
Once, I apologised to the school office for the stream of tiny payments landing on her desk. She told me she never minded. I was making it work, and that was to be encouraged. Before long she stopped printing a receipt every week and printed the whole batch at the end of term.
Swimming lessons were harder. We're a family of boat and water lovers, and I wanted her swimming confidently enough to help someone else if she ever needed to. The Porirua City Council didn't offer payment plans.
I wrote to them anyway, after hours at my desk while I waited for her to finish dancing. I rewrote that letter three times to get the tone right: polite, professional, honest about the budget without making it a sob story. I nearly deleted it.
They don't offer instalments, so why would they say yes to me?
They said no.
Then they offered another way. If I paid the first term upfront, I could pay off the next term in instalments, as long as it was paid up in time.
Their reply arrived while I was at work. I was surprised, and so pleased my perseverance had paid off. It meant getting a term ahead of myself, which was difficult to do, but it worked.
I did it for about seven years.
Not every ask landed.
The NZTA accepted my first car rego advance instalment, then refunded it and politely declined.
Asking to pay things off weekly knocked my pride every time.
Thankfully most of the 'asking' could be done by email. But finding a way to make it work was always the louder voice than my pride was.
People were often surprised at everything my daughter got to be part of. I told them straight: it's because I pay $2.79 a week.
That habit carried us further than I ever imagined.
Six months of weekly payments got her to New York on a Digital Technologies School trip. Two year later, eight months of weekly payments got her to Los Angeles to perform international and train with the best in the world with her dance school.
What the $2.79 was really buying
Looking back, the secret wasn't the money.
It was looking ahead, naming what was coming, and asking early, while there was still time for someone to say "here's another way."
Leave it to the last minute and the only answer left is no.
That's how I think about risk in any piece of work. It isn't there to be feared. It's there to be looked at early, while you can still do something about it.
If that's where you are right now, my article Managing Risk Without Creating Fear walks through how to do it calmly.
Project management support in Central Otago and Wānaka
I’m Pip Rudhall Hyett, based in Cromwell and working with businesses, organisations and community groups across Central Otago, Wānaka and the wider Queenstown Lakes area.
If you’d like help working through the risks in your project, we can start with a conversation. A Clarity Consult gives you space to talk through the challenge.
Plan It helps you work out the steps, responsibilities and risks before you get underway. Run It provides hands-on support to lead the project through.
You’re welcome to get in touch while things are still a bit untidy. We can work through them together. Not-for-profits, the first five to book a Clarity Consult before 30 November 2026 get 50% off.
Email pip@rudhallhyett.co.nz or explore more of what we offer on the rest of the website: www.rudhallhyett.co.nz.
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