I was talking yesterday with a mom of one of the students in my money class about how abstract the concept of spending money can be. Sure, kids know how to buy stuff. That’s pretty concrete. But do kids understand what happens behind the scenes when we buy things using our credit card? This mom described how enlightened she became when she and her husband took their two kids out to dinner and paid in cash. Both her boys were…
I was working with a small group of kids today and I wanted to see if they could resist temptation. I explained that a study had been done over 30 years ago where kids were given a marshmallow and told if they resisted eating it right away they would get another marshmallow at the end of the “lesson”. Some kids resisted. Some didn’t. Here’s the interesting part…these marshmallow kids were followed for over 30 years. According to the study, those…
We weren’t sure Ryan was going to make it through an entire movie from Netflix, so we flipped through the channels looking for something halfway decent that the rest of us could watch even if he fell asleep part-way through. He never fell asleep and we all made it to the end of Two Weeks Notice with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. It was a cute romantic comedy and everyone already knew the ending a few minutes in. But having…
Nathan and I had it all figured out. The timer was set for two hours and twenty minutes as a backup in case I forgot my role in his Odyssey Black Series i9. Now it was simply the waiting game. The i9 is a putter. Retail it sells for about $250. But a number of years ago Nathan discovered ebay and since then has rarely purchased a club in his ever growing arsenal to be a scratch golfer that wasn’t…
Nathan and Ryan came home a little dejected. They had spent three hours working for Tom and they didn’t get paid for the work. Tom is our neighbor. He’s retired and does a lot of stuff around his house. The boys work for him from time to time and love it because Tom pays them $13/hour. But they have to earn it. When they come home from a day at Tom’s, they sleep well that night. Last month Tom…