I’ve been away a lot lately. I haven’t really been in my office and I haven’t written a Moneywise Tip in quite a while. Sometimes family responsibilities have to take priority over other things. And that has been my situation as my father arrived at the final weeks of a long illness and then passed away.
My father was a teacher by trade (German and French), and he was always teaching something to someone, whether in the classroom or not. While he never succeeded in teaching me to speak German (much to his dismay), he did manage to teach me quite a bit about money over the years.
My dad grew up poor. He was born during the Great Depression, and after his parents divorced he lived with his father in a one room cabin without electricity. Because he knew what it was like not to have money, he was very careful with it once he actually had some (after 4 years in the U.S. Navy and working his way through college on the G.I. Bill).
I remember always receiving an allowance as a child. That is how I learned about how to receive a regular paycheck and that more money didn’t come around until the next payday. My dad was paid every two weeks, so my allowance came every two weeks. So I had to get used to saving and budgeting. As I grew older and took on more responsibilities in the house, my allowance grew to reflect that. I learned that more work yields more money.
My dad helped me start a savings account when I was young. I remember a program in my elementary school where students all started savings accounts together and brought deposits to school for regular savings. But I didn’t participate because I already had my savings account, and it was growing whenever I had some extra allowance or some birthday or Christmas money. Over the years I learned the value of having some extra cash stashed away in case of emergency or for a purchase that required saving ahead. And now I still have an automatic transfer to savings set up right after every pay day.
My dad also taught me about loans. My sister and I were desperate to have a television in the bedroom we shared. But the 12 inch black and white TV we dreamed of was more than $40, which may as well have been a million dollars for two elementary age kids in the 1970’s. But my dad loaned us the money. He kept a ledger of the amount we owed, and we paid it back over time, in dribs and drabs. I remember at one point handing my dad a small box full of pennies to pay on that account. And he accepted that and subtracted it from my balance due. I’m not quite sure how long we took to pay off that TV, but I’ll always remember my first loan.
My dad was quite the master of budgeting as well. He didn’t have spreadsheets, but he worked out his budget extraordinarily well using the envelope system (which I understand made a recent comeback thanks to TikTok). Every payday he would go to the bank and get a certain amount of cash to fill the envelopes. He had a list of exactly how many of each denomination bill he needed. Then he would lay it all out on his desk like a Monopoly banker and would fill each envelope with the budgeted amount. Each regular expense had its own envelope. Then when the bill came due, he would go to that envelope and get the money to pay that bill. If the amount in the envelope wasn’t enough, he would rework the budget and would have to figure out which category could spare a little to cover the difference that month. It seemed incredibly complicated at the time. But it was amazingly effective.
My dad taught me so many things I am grateful for. The lessons weren’t always easy at the time. (Especially the time he taught me how to stop going up hill without drifting backward in a manual transmission car. That lesson came with a LOT of tears.) But I will forever be grateful for the many things he taught me. I hope I am able to have anywhere close to that kind of a positive impact on other people’s lives. Thank you, Pops!
