The Power of Money

When I was growing up I didn't always have a need for money. I was fortunate enough to have parents who provided all the basics for me and on occasion, if an occasion called for it, both my brother and I would get a little reward. Whether it was a toy or going out for ice cream, the result was the same, we came to the realization that the reward was something rare and meant to be appreciated. When we got a bit older, our parents gave us a weekly allowance. These days kids earn a lot by way of allowance but when I was earning it in the early days, I wasn't getting more than a dollar a week. Kids may read this and laugh now but I think it was a major step in helping me learn to appreciate the value of a dollar.

While I won't consider my life to be of the same order as Paris Hilton or other such rich debutantes, I will say that I lived a comfortable life when I was under the care of my parents. One could argue that it gave me a taste of the good life and thus skewed my expectations for myself in the long run. What I mean is that perhaps it meant that I got used to certain things and would accept no less when the time came to be on my own. I think that perhaps that would have been true had it not partially been for the fact that I earned a dollar a week. Although my parents bought things for me once in a while, after I started getting an allowance, I realized that I could buy things on my own but that I would have to spend wisely otherwise it would be a long while before money built up again.

I am a music fanatic and every so often I would go to the music store and buy some music. Still, there were many CDs that I would have liked to have bought at the time but I hesitated because I knew I would have to wait a long while before earning back my money. At a dollar a week, a CD costing $16 meant that it would be nearly four months before I earned back what I spent on the CD. I could go and bug my parents (which is what a lot of kids do) and had they given in then I would never have appreciated what I was earning.

There are some parents out there who always complain that their kids don't know why its important to save money or to spend wisely. There was one boy who I taught in my martial arts class who was notorious for breaking his wooden training swords. Although they are made of fairly strong wood, they are not indestructible. Still, this boy would practice his cutting techniques on trees and end up breaking the sword after a few days. Although the swords aren't all that expensive, at the rate of two a month, he was basically throwing money out the door. We let his mother know that she shouldn't keep buying him new swords since he didn't appreciate the value of the sword or the money used to buy it.

His mother told us that she wasn't buying them but rather leaving it up to the boy to purchase from his allowance. She told us this and then spotted him an advance for his purchase of yet another sword. If I could get such advances from my job then I wouldn't be living in a two bedroom condo but rather in an uber-beachfront mansion. Even though I'm earning decent money these days I still think about what I want to spend it on and whether or not these things are really necessary. Sure I could afford to buy extravagant things but in doing so, I'm sending money out the door and potentially not saving enough for later on. And at this stage in my life, I shouldn't be looking to my parents to bail me out. I think that's a valuable lesson that parents can help teach kids and it will help ground their thinking in reality.