I grew up in a house or maybe just a time where money felt like one of those taboo topics; like sex and religion, that are not to be discussed with others. It seemed like if you had money and talked about it you were bragging and if you didn’t have money and talked about it you were begging. Today, too many of us don’t have a solid grip on our finances. We feel broke all of the time but we spend money like we were born with a silver spoon in our mouth.
As a kid, I didn’t have any money. Papa Jack retired from the NYC police force when I was 9 years old and we moved Upstate. He had a small pension and a rather frugal wife but they still had 4 kids in school. He worked at various places over the years and raised some animals (mostly chickens) and grew plenty of vegetables to help with the food budget. Money was tight but we always had enough.
My parents experimented with giving us an allowance but it never happened with any consistency so having money in your pocket simply didn’t happen. That is until I started babysitting the kids next door when I was around twelve. When I was a teenager, I graduated to washing dishes at the one restaurant in the area. I quickly became a saver, who tucked away her earnings in a plastic cup on the shelf of my closet until I could get to the bank. I remember asking my boss not to pay me until she could give me a $100 bill!
My parents were good with money and instilled that in me at a young age. I understood the importance of paying my own way, of saving for a rainy day and not wasting my money on frivolous things. I can still remember Mother Fran’s black and white composition notebook that contained the family budget. It had neatly drawn columns and row after row of penciled in numbers.
Once, my curiosity got the best of me and I asked her to tell me what she was doing. She explained about the columns at the top of the page which had titles like “mortgage”, “maintenance”, “food” and “kids clothes”. Each one had an amount at the top which was the budget for the year. I asked what would happen if something big went wrong with the house. She pointed at the column labeled “kids clothes” and said some of this money would get moved to “maintenance”. I guess that explains why I always had plenty of hand-me-down clothes to wear.
I asked my siblings what lessons they learned from my parents about money. Child #2 said when she was a kid she remembered having a bank book and putting part of her allowance into the bank every week. She said the school helped with getting that done. I guess the older kids in my family did receive an allowance. I cry foul! I don’t remember any money education in school except one lesson on how to write out a check.
Mother Fran has always been good with money. Her father died when she was young and she had to work hard to help her mom take care of her two younger sisters. She got a job when she graduated high school doing some bookwork for a local company. She and my dad made some good investments in the stock market and learned some valuable lessons. Child #2 says it was on Mother Fran’s advice that she began to invest in Vanguard in the 1980’s. Mother Fran advised me to do the same and that was a wise decision!
I had a co-worker in the past who had some credit card debt from his college years. When I met him, he had just gotten married and was moaning that he was still paying for pizza and beer from 10 years ago. I have another friend who remembers the credit card companies coming to her high school to “help” students open an account. She had debt before she even entered college. These friends never met Mother Fran when they were kids to give them money lessons. I am lucky, that I learned her lesson on how to safely use credit cards by paying them off in their entirety every month. I would hate to be paying for a pizza and beer from 2010!
I feel so grateful to my parents that they instilled in me the knowledge on how to manage my money and how to make it grow. Their informal lessons on this topic helped me to pay off $40,000 of graduate school loans. I feel bad for kids today that graduate college with a boat load of debt. It was hard enough for me to pay off my loans and I had a good foundation on the importance of doing so from a young age. I made mistakes along the way ant it took me 15 years to get out from underneath that burden. Writing the final check to finish paying off that loan was a very happy day and I swore I would never go into debt again!
I wonder what money lessons kids in school or at home learn today. Do they learn about compound interest, how to live within their means, or the importance of paying their bills. Do they know how to balance a checkbook or even know what a checkbook is? Do they learn the value of money and how to measure the value of they purchases they want to make? Do they learn about the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement?
I don’t have kids but if I did, I think talking to them about money would be a really good thing to do. My friends who didn’t learn money lessons at an early age are paying for that lack of knowledge well into their adult years. If you have kids, do them a favor and make them work for what they want. Teach them to save for tomorrow, pay their own way and the dangers of debt. Give them a lesson on compound interest, investing, and the importance of delayed gratification. Even little kids can learn some basic concepts like choosing between Toy A and Toy B instead of buying them both.
When wealthy parents raise their kids with a silver spoon in their mouth, they get spoiled, rich adult kids. When the rest of us do it, we get adults who earn a good paycheck but are in debt up to their eyeballs; raising their kids to do the same. This cycle of poverty looks different on the surface than the one we typically think of but it is still a cycle that ought to be broken.
Lake Girl
