The Bucks Don’t Stop Here
by Bill Crawford
It
was the moment that every parent waits for, the defining moment when an infant becomes really,
truly human. Our daughter was struggling to say her first word. “Muh, muh,
muh,” the baby began. “`Mummy,’ she’s going to say `Mummy,'” my wife and I
whispered. How perfect. How fitting. The cockles of our parental hearts warmed
to 101 degrees. “Muh, muh,” she continued. My wife and I leaned close to hear
the golden phrase, the syllables that we would remember forever. Finally, our
daughter took a deep breath, looked right at us and said, “Money.”
Our daughter’s first word: Money. Great. As if we weren’t completely psychotic
about money, anyway. As if all moms and dads aren’t completely obsessed and
worried about money. Even before the kids arrive, parents begin to go money
crazy. They treat their bank accounts like some kind of fertility drug. “All we
need is $50,000 in a money market fund earning 6.5% and then we will be able to
have healthy, brilliant, well-mannered children.”
But it doesn’t work that way. You never have enough money for kids. There’s
diapers, formula, play pens, baby clothes, stuffed animals, squishy books,
truckloads of paper towels, car seats, crackers, and, the biggest financial
nightmare, Christmas.
Parent think, “Oh, well, we’ll both keep working. That’ll cover the bills.”
Big mistake. One or the other working parent usually finds out real quick that
they are actually losing money by working, if they figure in child care
costs and increased stress. The way I looked at it, though, it was either keep
working at a loss, or watch my mind dissolve into a puddle of poop and pabulum.
When it comes to dads and money, education doesn’t help. I have an M.B.A., for
example. I know all about FIFO, LIFO, and PV. But when it comes to MONEY, I am
the Big Daddy of financial disasters. I’ve tried making money from jute
products, fine art, legal research, used furniture, and game shows. Somehow, I
have managed to avoid financial security in almost every field of human
endeavor.
It’s not just me. Our entire money-getting parental paradigm is just flat
wrong. It was cooked up by a group of mortgage bankers and stock brokers way
back in the late Fifties. Huddled around their water bubblers, these financial
shamans shaped a myth that has been passed down from parent to child to
magazine editor ever since. I call the myth “How Perfect Parents Achieved
Perfect Financial Security.” It goes like this:
“Perfect Parents get married. They stretch their credit to buy Perfect House.
Perfect House begins to increase in value. Perfect Parents beget Perfect Child.
Perfect Parents scrimp and save and create Perfect College Fund. Perfect
Parents feed Perfect College Fund dollars as they feed Perfect Child with baby
formula. When Perfect Child reaches the Perfect Age of 18, Perfect College Fund
is also big and strong. Perfect Parents use Perfect College Fund to pay for
Perfect Child’s college, medical school, law school, and four-year course of
cello lessons at Julliard. Perfect Parents sell Perfect House and retire to the
land of Perfect Golf Course and Perfect Financial Security.”
The myth of Perfect Parents may be great for bankers. But it’s lousy for dads.
Just as my daughter was saying her first word, “money,” my wife and I were in
the process of selling our house for exactly half of what we had bought it for.
And we were thankful to get that much. In today’s market, Perfect House is just
as likely to turn out to be Perfect Liability.
As far as a college fund is concerned, most working parents realize very
quickly that their educational nest egg is going to be smashed long before
their baby gets out of diapers. It’s much more expensive to send a child to
pre-school than to many universities. As far as saving for the future goes,
dads like myself quickly find out that the future is now.
In some ways, I think it’s a better investment to spend my money on the front
end of my kid’s education. Kids learn most of their important life lessons
before they are five, anyway. They learn how to walk, how to talk, and how to
weasel tasty snacks from their friends and teachers. If they are at a really
good daycare, they may even learn how to read and write.
By the time they get to college, there is not that much left to learn, except
how to deal with the real world. And the key to success in the real world is
learning how to deal with big, bewildering bureaucracies. Large, impersonal,
cheap universities are the best places to get an education in bureaucracy. Who
cares about the course load? Just figuring out the registration process is
enough to qualify anyone for a job with a major multinational.
The fact that working parent’s heaviest child-rearing costs fall in year one
and not in year 18 makes financial planning a real challenge. I was discussing
the issue with a friend of mine one day. He suggested that I set a goal.
“Okay,” I said, “I want $1 million in one year.”
“Okay,” he said. “Now visualize it.”
“Done,” I said.
“No, no,” my friend said. “You have to concretize your visualization. Make a
Time-Money Chart. Draw a graph with two axes. On the bottom axis mark off 12
months. And on the other axis put money from zero to $1 million.”
“In what increments?” I dutifully asked.
“Mmmm, maybe $50,000,” he suggested. “Enough to make a good growth line.”
I immediately went home. I pulled out a ruler, a mechanical pencil, and graph
paper. I concretized my visualization and stuck it on the refrigerator. Each
month I added another line to the chart, marking my progress on the way to
financial security. By the end of the year, I had diagramed the perfect playing
surface for a pool table. The line was absolutely flat. It had begun at zero
and at zero it had stayed.
My boy Joe had a much better solution. On a trip to the bank before lunch, I
walked up to the counter and began to fill out a withdrawal slip. Joe took one
and began to fill it out himself. My withdrawal slip had my name written on it
in my quavery illegible handwriting and the number 100.00 carefully drawn in
the digit boxes. Joe’s withdrawal slip had the name JOE written on the top in
his quavery illegible handwriting and the number 1,000,000,000 carefully drawn
in the digit boxes. “Is that enough money for lunch, Daddy?” asked Joe.
“There’s no such thing as enough money, Joe,” I told him.
I later explained to Joe that he had to put money into the bank before he
could take it out. He still gets confused by billboards that advertise Free
Money Orders.
“Why don’t we order some free money?” he asks.
My daughter’s financial ideas have also been influenced by roadside
attractions. She used to ask, “Why can’t we live in a house like that?”
whenever we would drive by a big fancy mansion. Now she sighs, just loud enough
and long enough so that I get the message.
One day, as we drove to school, my daughter made an announcement. “I want to
change my name to Katherine Adams Frostbank.” Adams was her middle name. That
made sense. And Katherine seemed pretty reasonable. But Frostbank?
“There,” she said pointing out the car window when I asked her about the name.
“See. On the side of that building. It says Frost Bank.”
Maybe the idea is not that Perfect Parents should provide for Perfect Child,
but that Perfect Child should provide for Perfect Parents. I was one of five
children. When we complained about money, my mother said, “What are you guys
whining about? There are five of you, right? Get out there and earn it
yourself. Just look at the Jackson Five. What’s the problem?”
Unfortunately, I only have one daughter and one son. Should I suggest the
Carpenters as a role model? I don’t think so.
This article appears in December 1 • 1995 and December 1 • 1995 (Cover).