The Book

As children my siblings and I all had our books.  As I recall my book was blue, my older siblings' books were black with red binding much like the one shown below.  I don't remember the color of Becca's book, but I believe Mark's was red and of course Doug had the supersize blue book.  I'm not sure why he had a big book, but I'm sure I've teased him it about it.  We kept them in my Dad's desk and pulled them out on occasion to record purchases, allowances or payments from something or other.  These books were of course ledger books and each of us was responsible for keeping track of how much money we had deposited in the bank of mom and dad.

Early on most of the money in the book came from a weekly allowance that my parents would give to me.  This was not a large allowance by any means, but it was constant.  My parents didn't believe in making an allowance stipulatory on our acts, rather it was a tool to teach financial management.  During this time most of the money going out was spent at the C-Store at the top of the street for candy.  Though oftentimes the bank of mom and dad gave me quite a guilt trip for the frivolous spending of my money. to their credit they never did say no to my withdrawals.  

As I got older I would deposit lawn mowing money into my book.  This consisted of mowing the lawn and rather than having dad or mom pay me any money I would just record it in my book.  The biggest deposit each year came around my birthday when I would endorse my birthday check from grandma and hand it over to mom so I could record it in my book. On a few occasions my sum of money would get to a level that I would transfer a portion of it to the bank where I would earn interest.  I credit the book, for better or worse, for making me the tightwad that I am today.  

I didn't learn much of investing from my book, that spark came from an investment in Peter Lynch's Magellan fund at Fidelity Investments given by my grandparents to all their grandchildren.  There's nothing like a mutual fund earning upwards of 20% a year to pique one's interest in investing.  That's a story for another day (or another blog).

This brings us to yesterday.  Melissa decided that she was going to clean out the garden/shrub/trash area in the front area (she found a beer bottle in the area that has been there at least 2 years, but probably a lot more).  In doing so she found the best way to clean up the landscaping pebbles was to pick them up one by one, put them in a bucket and take them around back to the kids play area.  She had the wonderful idea to pay the kids 1 penny for each rock they put in the bucket.  Jessi and Spencer made $4 each yesterday.

Melissa and I don't carry cash.  We have $200 in ones and fives that we have had for the past 5 years in a ziplock bag for emergencies, but otherwise we just don't carry cash.  In order to pay Jessi and Spencer their $8 it would cost us $20 because once it is out of the bank it is as good as gone.  So in an effort to save ourselves the extra $12 we decided this was a perfect time to institute the ledger books (something we had planned to do when Spencer started 2nd grade).  

Ledger books aren't quite as prevalent nowadays as they were 25 years ago so after searching various stores we ended up back at Wal-Mart and bought 6 ledger books for $5 each (so much for that $12 savings).  It's not that we couldn't afford more books later, but I'm not sure you will even be able to buy ledger books at Wal-Mart in 5 more years and they run $20-$40 a piece at Staples.

The point of this whole story is that we bought 6 books which means Melissa has finally relented in her fight for 5 children, and I get to continue my search for a Yukon or Tahoe.