Teaching Marina about money has been a long and winding road…with much laughter. We’ve been trying to do the right thing as parents. If we don’t teach the Rising Daughters™ how to manage money, then credit card, “E-Z Quick Loan" or "FastCashBack” companies will. That’s not a risk we want to take. Dollars and sense.
I say “we” when in reality it means “me.” Truth be told, I couldn’t find my own ass financially until my mid-twenties. The university loan repayments started to kick in and the party was over. My lovely wife, however, was born fiscally prudent and rational. I want our daughters to split the difference behaviorally between us parents. At face value, it seems Lady E. got Naomi’s “smart with money” DNA. And -- I write this with love -- M. was left with my inital slapdash approach to managing money and saving for the future.
Library “Book-o-nomics” is the precursor to this post. It was the strategy I created to get Marina to understand that library books cost money and that lost library books will cost her money. While we were living in Tennessee, she lost a book. I made her go with me to the library to find out from the librarian what happens. We broke down the $20 book replacement cost into monthly payments subtracted from her allowance. Every month I’d remind her why she was $1.50 short of what she was supposed to receive. I'd show the record of what she’d paid and what balance remained. She followed the plan and paid it back. Lesson learned, right?
Wrong.
More backstory. Slime is a viscous, gooey, multicolored glob that you can pound, pull apart, and do all kinds of creative kooky kid stuff. It’s also sticky and oozy as tree sap and IMPOSSIBLE to remove from carpets. For this reason, we repeatedly warned Marina not to use slime in her bedroom and, if she “forgot” and it got stuck on the carpet, she’d be responsible for fixing it.
You guess what happened next. The warnings were ignored. When moving out, even a professional carpet cleaner could not remove the hardened slime globs and stains. We had to replace the whole carpet in her room, costing north of $400.
It was time for Round 2 of taking responsibility-for-your-actions. “Rug-o-nomics” was born.
I did some math and at $2.50 per month—roughly 15% of her monthly allowance—it would take 13 years for her to pay it back. She’d be a college graduate by then. I increased the monthly payback to $7.50 per month to raise the financial pain threshold together with a new incentivized idea. I recalled Marina’s great public speaking effort back in January 2020 at the Williamson County 4H club.
Her topic: Being responsible for your actions. My idea was to get her to rehash her ideas in a long, two- or three-page formal essay about being responsible for one’s actions. Doing so would rehash the responsibility element and need some written work. Perfect combination, right?
Wrong.
She agreed to this new ploy six months ago. Yet no action. She’s still willing to take a 42% monthly drop in her allowance rather than do the essay.
To motivate her, we first showed her how much more money she’d get every month if she did the essay. Nothing happened.
Negative reinforcement though nagging and shaming didn’t work. We tried the positive route again with a tangible thing: how much candy she could buy with an extra 750 yen (about $7.50).
She's done neither research nor writing so far. What to do? We might have to go to DEFCON 1 and threaten complete allowance retraction. My preference remains the carrot over the stick, though.
I do believe that this story will end positively. Goodness knows if I could eventually get my financial act together, so can Rising Daughter #2.
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