ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, March 6, 1997 TAG: 9703060033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
For my son Max's third birthday, my brother sent a card with three crisp dollar bills tucked inside.
It was his first experience with cold hard cash, other than seeing us retrieve it from the automatic-teller machine - the '90s version of a money-sprouting tree.
Max wasn't sure what to do with the green paper. So, perhaps too hastily, we suggested the obvious: Spend it.
``You mean at the cookie store?'' he asked. The cookie store is code for Harris Teeter, which lures parents in by giving their kids a free cookie - and enough of a sugar buzz to wind them up for the weekly battle of the toy aisle.
His first buying impulse was practical: He would buy cereal with his $3. Then, he suggested, some bread.
You could almost hear the light bulb click as the other possibilities came to mind: the forbidden doughnuts near the free-cookie section, Gummi bears in the candy aisle, balloons by the bunch, one of those Fast-Action Junior Police Motorcycles.
We just sat there, awed by the ecstasy of unbridled avarice.
Then, in an unexpected turn of philanthropy, Max offered to buy a movie for my husband, a book for me and new Spiderman PJs for a buddy at school.
All told, his $3 had been stretched to $32.63, not counting the lifetime supply of Junior Mints.
We need to talk, I told him.
A big impression
Money is the most necessary of evils. No matter how simply or elaborately we live, most of us are slaves to it in one form or another.
A friend's daughter was puzzled about why her mom had to work in order to pay the bills, when it seemed a lot easier just to go to the ATM machine and get the money there.
Ah, if it were only that easy. ...
The true value of a dollar - and what goes into earning a buck - is one of the hardest, and most important, lessons a parent can teach a child.
When Dawn Simmons was a little girl, her parents encouraged her to save for special purchases by squirreling her pennies away in a piggy bank. Once a year, they'd haul the pig downtown to the grand main office of Dominion Bank, at Jefferson and Campbell.
``There were marble floors and ropes directing you where to go, and the teller behind the counter would help me roll up the pennies,'' she recalled. ``It made a big impression on me - made me kinda proud and big-headed.''
The urge to splurge
Now Simmons is 24 and a teller herself. A new-accounts rep for First National Bank of Rocky Mount, she estimates about half her customers set up accounts for their children in hopes of teaching them to save.
Parents today are instilling a sense of financial worry in their older children, she believes - especially in today's climate, where no job lasts forever and Social Security doesn't seem so secure.
Simmons has already set up accounts for her 15-month-old daughter ``for college, or just to hold on to till she needs it,'' Simmons says. ``I see how it's going, what it's gonna be like in 50 years.
``I want her to know that it's OK to splurge every now and then, but not all the time.''
Incidentally, tellers no longer roll coins for you - you have to take them in already rolled yourself. Few banks offer Christmas-club accounts for kids any more, either - the Rocky Mount bank is a rare exception. Fortunately, the age-old tradition of handing out Dum-Dum suckers still persists, only now tellers offer an additional drive-through treat dog biscuits. ``We get as many dogs through here as we do kids!'' says Treva Fronk of Central Fidelity.
Stock market etch-a-sketch
For kids who are beyond Dum-Dums and bank-savings accounts, Andy Hudick suggests doing what he did as a youngster. Three afternoons a week, he'd run to his neighbor's house in Rockingham County, where together they read the Wall Street Journal and charted the stocks, by hand.
``I still remember the neighbor's favorite was Abbott Labs, which I never bought because the chart was boring,'' recalls Hudick, now an adviser with Fee-Only Financial Planning in Roanoke. ``It didn't go up and down enough - which is good - but I was a kid!
``I wanted it to go up and down so it would make these little pictures.''
A safe way for kids to invest in the stock market, Hudick suggests, is via mutual funds or brokerage firms that offer low-minimum-deposit investment plans for children. ``They get a statement every month with their name on it,'' which can be a great teaching tool.
Another financial planner made it a rule early on that her kids must save half of their money, both gifts and earnings. ``That might be severe for some people, but that's her teaching method,'' Hudick says. ``The biggest thing we see with adults is people who have never been taught or encouraged to save money - and they just can't do it.''
Hudick credits his mom for his own saving savvy and work ethic. His foray into the stock market was funded not by allowances, but by picking up Coke bottles along the roadside and turning them in for cash refunds.
``I used to mow a guy's field with a push mower, and he'd pay me a dollar an hour, and it'd take me eight-and-a-half hours to do the job. One time he paid me $10 because I'd worked my butt off, and my mom made me return the $1.50.''
Hide the Visa card
I won't tell you how long it took to spend the $3 at Harris Teeter.
Suffice it to say, Max became so drunk with greed that he huffed to a stranger in the cereal aisle: ``This is my store!''
In the end, we left with a four-pack of plastic Robin Hood figurines for $2.99 and a doughnut coated with sugary pastel stars.
I fronted him the extra 37 cents, and he left the store satisfied, not unlike The Donald after a multimillion dollar deal.
Everything was OK until today's mail arrived with a belated card from Uncle Louie in New York - and three more dollar bills fell out and floated, like ticker tape, down to the floor.
LENGTH: Long : 112 linesby CNB