Allowance

My dad is not the only source of strange childhood memories. My mother, a mathematician-turned-stay-at-home-mom, devised a rather strange system when it came to an allowance for my sister and me. I started getting an allowance at the age of four. This may seem young, but I figure if the kid is old enough to beg for candy while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store, they’re old enough to get a small allowance and waste their own money on the candy (coincidentally, I was about four when I turned to my dad and said “Commercials are lies, aren’t they?” Perhaps I had purchased something with my new allowance and found it didn’t live up to my expectations. Who knows?) Remember, it’s better for a kid to make small mistakes with a small amount of money early on rather than making big mistakes with a lot of money once they are out on their own. The allowance started out simple – one quarter a week for every year of age. We had to buy non-necessities, including toys, movie tickets and refreshments, in-state amusement park tickets, and desserts (soda counted as a dessert, by the way). In the summer, our allowance became $5 dollars so we could buy snacks at the snackbar at the pool. To prevent us from buying and eating tons of desserts, there was also a limit of three desserts a day, with Mom defining what quantity of any given food constituted a desert (six Thin Mints, 4 Tagalongs, 3 home-made cookies, 2 pieces of fudge, one bowl of ice cream, etc.). However, because part of the point appears to have been to limit our sugar intake, desserts already in the house had to be purchased from Mom. This included home-baked goods like chocolate-chip cookies and mint peanut-butter fudge (yes, you read that flavor right. It’s the only flavor my mom likes that the candy industry hasn’t stolen. Shhhh!) There was a whole price structure:

Home-made cookies: 10 cents a cookie
Fudge: 25 cents a square
Soda: 25 cents a can (I also recall 10 cents a glass when taken from a 2-liter bottle)
Girl Scout cookies: each cookie was the cost of the box divided by the number of cookies – Thin Mints were cheapest at 6 cents a piece
Ice Cream – 50 cents a bowl maybe? Can’t remember. Didn’t have it quite as often.

Whenever company came over, I would get excited if for no other reason than dessert would be free that night. Christmas and birthdays meant free toys as well as toys we weren’t patient enough to save up for. Which brings me to savings.

Apparently, when I was little, I lost something important to me but did not have enough money to buy a replacement. I panicked and threw a fit and finally my Mom leant me the money, but ever since I have been a compulsive saver. I saved up for and purchased my Nintendo and a TV for my room (Nintendo came first and was stationed in the family room until I got the TV a couple of years later). Grandma’s Christmas and birthday checks helped, but most of the money was from saving my allowance.

My mother started to realize that my sister was not developing nearly the level of savings habits that I was. So when she upped our allowance and added clothes to the list of things we had to buy ourselves, she created a budget. Half of each week’s allowance had to be set aside for clothes. Fifty cents was for offering at church (Tithe? Methodists don’t tithe!). I think there was at least a dollar or so we were suppose to save for gifts to friends and family. This kept either of us from spending all of our allowance on non-necessities only to find we had ten dollars to buy a season’s worth of wardrobe with. Even K-Mart ain’t that cheap.

These days, my sister still spends money more freely than I do, but she’s way better at saving than many of her friends. While her peers beg their parents for spending money, she’s paying for part of a trip to India that she is taking starting next week with money she saved from her job. My parents are paying the rest. (It’s college-related. My parents were kind enough to pay for both of our college educations. Nice, eh, what?) My parents hear their friends complain about how their kids want $90 shoes or refuse to buy anything off the “Sale” rack. “How is this a problem?” my dad says. “If they want it, they can buy it themselves.” So spoiled by us, my parents are. :)

Now, not everyone can afford to give their kids an allowance. But I think allowances are important for the middle-class and upper-class kids who have everything provided for them, particularly if their parents have trouble saying “no” and meaning it. It’s more difficult to gauge the value of money when the supply seems endless or at least dependent only on how much you whine.