I Stopped Giving My Family

How charging for my time turned me from the “computer guy” into an actual person with boundaries

“Hey, quick question…”

My mom said it like she was asking what time the movie starts, not like she was about to drop a three‑hour IT project in my lap.

“The printer isn’t working. Again. It was fine yesterday. Can you just… fix it?”

I was standing in her kitchen, still holding my shoes, half in the doorway. I’d come over for dinner. I left at 11:40 p.m., smelling like burnt ink and driver updates, with cold food in the microwave and a knot between my shoulders.

That was the night I realized I wasn’t visiting my family anymore.

I was clocking in. I just wasn’t getting paid.

So I did the most un–family-friendly thing I’d ever done.

I started charging them.

How I Became the Unpaid IT Department for My Entire Family

It didn’t happen overnight.

It started small. A cousin asking which laptop to buy. My dad needing help “logging into the Wi‑Fi.” My sister’s boyfriend wondering if I could “take a quick look” at a slow phone.

I work in tech, so at first it felt… flattering.

It meant I was useful. Needed. The Smart One.

But these “quick questions” multiplied like tabs in a browser.

Suddenly holidays came with a side of troubleshooting.

Christmas Eve? I was on the floor under a desk, tracing cables.

Thanksgiving? Remote sessions to “fix the internet” so my uncle could stream football.

My grandma once handed me her phone at a funeral and whispered, “It won’t ring. I think it died.”

The ringer was off.

Everyone laughed when I fixed it, like I’d performed a magic trick.

The thing about being good with technology is that people assume your time is limitless because, to them, what you do is almost invisible.

“Can you just…”

“While you’re here…”

“This shouldn’t take long…”

They say that last one the way people say “no offense” before saying something offensive.

It always took long.

And it was never “while you’re here.” It became the reason I was there.

The Quiet Cost No One Talks About

There were two kinds of cost.

The obvious one: time.

Saturday mornings vanished into Outlook passwords and suspicious browser toolbars.

I’d plan an afternoon for myself, and it would evaporate with one “hey, are you busy?” text.

I started dreading unknown numbers because they were almost always someone’s “tech emergency.”

Emergency, in this case, meaning: their Netflix wouldn’t remember their login.

The second cost was the one I didn’t have words for at first.

Resentment.

It crept in quietly.

I’d be halfway through fixing something and realize I hadn’t actually had a real conversation with this person in months that wasn’t mediated by a screen.

I knew my uncle’s router login, but not how he was dealing with his divorce.

I knew my mom’s iCloud storage situation better than her mental health.

I’d walk in and people would literally greet me with, “Oh good, you’re here, my phone is acting weird.”

Not “How are you?” Not “I’ve missed you.”

Just “my phone is acting weird.”

It’s a small sentence, but it slices.

At some point I realized: my value in my family had shrunk down to a role.

Not a son. Not a brother. Not a cousin.

I was Tech Support.

The Breaking Point: When “Can You Fix This?” Finally Broke Me

There wasn’t some big blowout. No screaming match. No dramatic storming out.

It was stupider than that.

It was a printer.

Again.

My dad called on a Sunday morning.

“You home?” he asked.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“The printer stopped working. I think it’s probably nothing. Can you come over and just set it up again?”

I had already promised myself that morning.

No work. No favors. Just coffee, a book, and the luxury of not troubleshooting anything.

I stared at my calendar. I stared at my car keys. I stared at the ceiling.

And I heard myself say, “Sure. I’ll be there in 20.”

On the drive over, something felt ugly in my chest. Not at him—he wasn’t doing anything new.

At myself.

I showed up, fixed the printer, updated the drivers, connected the Wi‑Fi, showed him (for the fifteenth time) where the print dialog lives, and then he said the sentence that detonated something inside me:

“You’re a lifesaver. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

He meant it as a compliment.

What I heard was:

We only really call you when things are broken.

On the way home I realized I was angry in a way that didn’t match what had actually happened.

The printer wasn’t the problem.

I was.

I’d trained everyone to see my time as free.

Worse, I’d trained myself to see my time as owed.

The Most Awkward Sentence I’ve Ever Texted My Family

I sat down at my desk, opened the family group chat, and typed this:

“Hey everyone, quick heads up: I’m going to start treating tech help like my actual job. I’m still happy to help, but from now on anything that takes more than 10 minutes is billable. Family rate is $40/hr, minimum 1 hour. If it’s truly urgent, tell me, but otherwise I might say no or schedule it for later.”

I stared at it for fifteen minutes.

I rewrote it five times.

I almost deleted it. It felt rude. Transactional. Cold.

This is family.

You’re not supposed to send your own mother an invoice.

But I thought about all the evenings I’d lost, the plans I’d canceled, the weekends that disappeared into other people’s devices.

I hit send.

The chat went silent.

You know that sick feeling when you see three dots appearing, then disappearing, then not coming back at all? Multiply that by ten people.

Finally, my sister replied first:

“LMAO are we seriously getting billed now”

Then my aunt:

“Wow ok…”

Then my dad:

“We can talk about this.”

Nobody said, “That’s fair.”

Nobody said, “Good for you.”

No one even asked why.

Just like that, I had turned myself from The Helpful One into The Difficult One.

Or at least, that’s how it felt.

The First Time I Charged My Mom

The first “client,” if you can call her that, was my mom.

Of course it was.

She called a few days later.

“Hi honey. I think my laptop has a virus.”

I could hear the hesitation in her voice. The pause before the ask. The awareness of the new rule.

Old me would have rushed in with, “Yeah, sure, what’s it doing? Click the little icon—”

New me took a breath.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “Do you want me to take a look? Remember what I said about charging.”

There was a silence that made me want to fill it with apologies and discounts and “just this once.”

Instead, I waited.

“…How much will it be?” she asked.

“Probably an hour,” I said. “Forty.”

“Okay,” she said.

Just that. No guilt trip. No passive-aggressive sigh. Just “okay.”

She drove over. I sat her at my kitchen table and opened the laptop.

While I worked, she watched.

“Do you do this all day at your job?” she asked.

“More or less,” I said. “But there I get paid more and people listen when I explain things.”

She laughed, but then she got quiet.

“I didn’t realize how much time this takes,” she said after a while. “I thought you just… pressed a button.”

That sentence almost made me cry.

Not because of the money—forty dollars isn’t exactly life-changing—but because for the first time, she was seeing my work as work.

Not magic. Not a favor.

Work.

At the end, she handed me two twenties.

She looked like she was about to say something, then said this instead:

“I feel weird paying my own kid.”

“I feel weird charging my own mom,” I admitted.

We both laughed, but something had shifted between us.

We’d put value where before there had only been assumption.

The People Who Disappeared When I Started Charging

Some people adjusted. Some didn’t.

My sister mostly stopped asking for help entirely.

She texted once about her TV not connecting to Wi‑Fi, then followed it with, “Never mind, I’ll just Google it. I forgot I’d get a bill lol.”

I expected that text to sting.

It didn’t.

It actually made me smile.

She could Google it the whole time. She just… didn’t, because I was easier.

My uncle, the Netflix “emergency” guy, vanished.

No more Sunday panic calls. No more “the game is on and the internet is dead!” drama.

He did, however, hire a local computer repair shop once.

I found out from my dad, who said it like it was a betrayal.

“He paid some guy 80 bucks to come out and fix his Wi‑Fi,” he said. “You would’ve done it for free.”

I just nodded.

“I don’t do that for free anymore,” I said.

My dad didn’t respond, but he heard me.

Then there were the cousins who kept trying to find loopholes.

“Can you just look at it? I won’t make you actually fix it.”

“Can I just ask a quick question? I swear it’s under 10 minutes.”

“What if I pay you in beer?”

To be fair, some problems really did only take a minute or two, and I never turned those into invoices.

But what changed was this:

I stopped feeling obligated.

I started hearing the word “no” in my own voice and realized it wasn’t cruel.

It was honest.

I was no longer their on-demand IT department.

If they wanted that, they could hire one.

The Weirdest Part: Charging Actually Improved Our Relationships

Here’s what no one tells you:

Putting a price on something doesn’t always cheapen it.

Sometimes it makes it visible.

Once the awkwardness settled, something unexpected happened.

Our conversations changed.

I’d show up to my parents’ house and my dad would ask about my job instead of his router.

We’d talk about the news, about my sister’s life, about my aunt’s health.

Tech talk didn’t disappear, but it stopped being the default.

When people knew there was a cost attached, they suddenly found other things to say.

And when they did decide to pay me for help, the dynamic felt different.

They listened more carefully.

They wrote down steps.

They asked, “Is this a dumb question?” less, and “How can I not break this again?” more.

It wasn’t that they valued my time because they were paying me.

They always valued me. They just hadn’t been asked to show it before.

The money was just a way of saying: I see what you’re doing. I know it takes effort. I don’t take it for granted.

Charging also did something important inside my own head.

Every time I said, “This is my rate,” I was reminding myself that my skills had weight.

That I wasn’t being selfless by giving them away for free—I was draining myself.

What I Wish I’d Said Years Earlier

If you’re the unofficial tech support in your family, you probably recognize some of this.

The “quick questions” that turn into rabbit holes. The “you’re so good with computers” compliments that feel more like shackles than praise.

You might also recognize the guilt that bubbles up the second you even think about saying no.

Who charges their grandma to fix her iPad?

Who sends their mom a Venmo request for setting up a new phone?

It feels wrong.

Here’s what I wish someone had said to me sooner:

You don’t have to charge everyone.

You don’t have to charge anyone.

But you do have to acknowledge that your time has limits.

You’re allowed to say:

“I can’t do that today.”

“That will take a while, and I’m exhausted. Maybe this weekend.”

“I can help, but this is the kind of thing people pay me for, so here’s my rate.”

“I’ll show you this once, but after that you’ll need to hire someone.”

The point isn’t to turn your family into customers.

The point is to stop being an invisible resource.

Charging was just the blunt tool I used to force a conversation I’d been avoiding for years.

You might choose something softer—a boundary around days or hours, a limit on what you’ll do, a rule like “I’ll explain things, but I won’t be your backup brain.”

But there has to be something.

Because “I’ll always fix it, for free, whenever you ask” isn’t generosity.

It’s slow-motion self-erasure.

The Real Lesson Wasn’t About Money at All

Yes, I make a little extra now when I debug my mom’s laptop or rescue my dad’s email.

Yes, some relatives got offended and drifted away.

Yes, the first few conversations were horribly awkward.

But the surprising thing is this:

When I put a price on my tech support, what I really did was put a boundary around my identity.

I stopped being just “the computer person.”

I became a whole person again.

The one who likes old movies and bad coffee and long walks. The one who wants to talk about books and regret and hope, not just backup drives and browser history.

The next time I went to my parents’ house and nobody mentioned Wi‑Fi, I almost didn’t know what to do with myself.

We sat on the couch and talked about my childhood.

My mom told me a story I’d never heard about how scared she was when we first brought a computer into the house, how she thought she’d “break the internet” if she clicked the wrong thing.

“I guess I’ve been leaning on you since then,” she said.

She wasn’t talking about tech anymore, and we both knew it.

I didn’t need forty dollars for that moment.

I just needed to stop being on call long enough for it to happen.

If You’re the “Tech Person,” This Is Your Permission Slip

If your phone lights up every time a relative can’t find a file, this part is for you.

You’re allowed to step back.

You’re allowed to say no.

You’re allowed to charge, if that feels right, or to set rules, or to simply not answer every “urgent” text within five seconds.

You are not an app.

You are not a help desk.

You don’t exist purely to make other people’s devices behave.

The people who really care about you will adjust.

Some will complain. Some will test your boundaries. Some will disappear, and you’ll realize they only ever called when something broke.

But some will surprise you.

They’ll learn to Google.

They’ll watch a YouTube tutorial.

They’ll write down their passwords.

They’ll pay you when it’s big, and figure it out themselves when it’s not.

And in the space where constant obligations used to live, you might find something you didn’t realize you were missing:

Actual relationships.

Conversations that aren’t just “can you fix this?”

Time that belongs to you.

In the end, the weirdest thing about finally charging my family for tech support wasn’t that they started paying.

It’s that I finally stopped.

Stopped paying with my evenings. My patience. My presence.

I stopped paying with the parts of myself that no one could see on a screen.

And once I did, I could finally show up as a person again—not just the guy who knows where the settings menu is.