Wow, very similar stories indeed! I will say, most of my grocery shopping skills today were learned from my expert wife. When I met her ~10 years ago she had to re-teach me how to go grocery shopping. I was already decent, but she took things to the next level! The 99cent store, local Mexican markets in LA, buying bulk & splitting with neighbors, etc. Whenever one of us gets a really good deal somewhere we rush home to brag about it to the other :)

Cheers for reading Spiffi – have a great week!

I remember when we my younger brother was about 16, his friend D decided to host a party, and D’s mom gave him a budget for food, drinks etc. My brother went with D to the grocery store, and they walked through the produce section. D grabbed a pineapple, (in November) and decided that it would be a great centerpiece for a massive fruit platter! As he kept putting various exotic fruits into the cart, my brother just rolled his eyes. Eventually he sorted D out – and convinced him that he couldn’t really afford to spend 1/3 of his budget on a decorative centerpiece – but when he got home, he described the whole shopping trip to my mom, concluding “he has NO idea how to grocery shop!”

My mom taught by example – we participated in the family grocery shopping every week – and once we were old enough to drive, we often got sent out to do the grocery shopping on our own.

My first real job was at age 13 – I picked raspberries from 6am to noon every weekday for a month, and earned $100 – enough to pay for half of the boombox that I had picked out that I wanted for my birthday :D

Thanks Kae! I’m a fan of your blog too! Gratitude is the key to happiness :)

One value that’s an overall winner for kids is delayed gratification. When I was about 9, my parents offered me $100 if I went without chocolate for a whole year. That was more money than I could even fathom at the time. So I took them up on the bet… Do you know how hard that is for a 9 year old to say no to chocolate all year!!?? Hard. I missed cake at parties, easter, and almost every day I was tempted to give in. But I made it the entire year. Actually I did it 3 times! Self control and delayed gratification… I can’t thank my parents enough for making it challenging, and FUN!

I don’t feel like I grew up with the world’s best personal finance skills. My Dad handled it all at our house and was very particular and skilled with it himself..but he didn’t really have patience/ take time to “teach us his ways” exactly. I also worked from age 14 on (at McDonald’s, too!) and did a decent job of always spending less than I earned, plus my sister and I had to pay for our own car insurance, gas, cell phone bills, etc. However, I didn’t really develop some of the bigger picture skills and honestly I still get easily confused by personal finance stuff today.

As a mom now, we have our boys do chores and all of that, but they still live a pretty generally privileged lifestyle overall. I worry that they don’t truly appreciate it and I want to work on teaching them more about money management. We do give them an “allowance” (not directly tied to their chores, but they still do have to do chores), but I don’t think we have taught them the best system to monitor their incomes/expenditures at this point. They more just look and see what they have and go spend it. Haha. I’d like to work on longer term savings goals, etc. Great tips here!

Hey Papa! Manual labor is definitely a good thing for kids. And also good for adults! Same thing when I visit my parents – I just start helping out around the house wherever I can. Have a great weekend!

Normally, someone would tell him not to exaggerate. However, we did demolish a concrete sidewalk and remove the concrete from the house. I do not remember the measurements, but I will assume that there were 7 cubic meters of concrete a cubic meter of concrete weighs about 2,200 lbs so we moved around 15,400 lbs.

My response: “yeah that sounds about right.”

Nothing like doing a few (very) heavy chores to open you up to work that makes you sweat and sometimes bleed for money.

Cool to hear you always had your parents around to learn from! Eating meals together is a great childhood memory. That’s where most of our discussions and learning happened – conversations around the dinner table :) Thank you for your work as a nanny. Tough gig!

Thanks for sharing Andrew. Yep, even the smallest conversations about money have big impressions on kids.

I think parents who are honest with their kids and talk about finances (plus truely how much money they have) have more money conscience kids.
-Andrew