Justin Warsham is your nut cheese.
We talked about we've talked about money before with kids, and and gosh, how you teach him and how they learned money, and it's just an awful I.
Think of your example that you did with your kids when an earlier time when we talked about this subject, where you said that you basically translated your entire monthly expenses and income into quarters to put it down on like a smaller scale, but to make it tactile, and then showed the kids, Okay, this is how much money we make.
This goes to the house, This goes to food.
This goes to you know whatever, so that this is how much is left left over us to play around with.
Yeah, I still don't know if they remember that. I should ask that. I bet you they do. I would be.
I think you'd be, because I mean, look, you got well he Calvin moved out again, right right, So he's out on his own, but he has he ever had more than what you would expect, right, Like, he's not struggling financially because he's out, Like he's not doing the thing that I at least did. I'll put myself like I turned eighteen I got a credit card for Macy's because why not couldn't afford a hundred dollars watch?
So I financed it for two years because that's what smart people do. Gary, one hundred dollar watch turned into two.
Well, now I had a job at nine, Like it wasn't like I didn't understand how to earn a buck.
Right, It's a weird thing. Money works in such a weird way. I almost equate it to food in that you got to teach people how to eat correctly, right, But everybody's got to eat in this case, unless you're living in some weird militant vegan cult. You're going to have to use money at some point. So where you get it from, how do you how do you keep it, how do you use it wisely?
All that sort of stuff.
An article that you you found for us is whether or not a parent should be giving money to a kid for you know.
Talking money, Like basically I think the way like you have allowance, right, which allowance I think has been I don't know if it was always defined this way. I feel like allowance has become almost like alimony to your kid, Like you just give them money you know they're not doing anything right, and then they get paid for chores.
And so this is coming from an argument between a married couple where dad's like, I want the kid to have pocket money, just roaming around money because he thinks that's a good way for the kid to learn like oh, I'm out of pocket money and to have their own money. So if they want to get a candy bar at the grocery store, well do you have enough money out of your pocket to do it? But mom's like, well,
they need to earn the money. And he's like, great, well, let's pay him for the chores, and she's like, no, No.
The chores they do is because they're a part of the households the chores and in the experts that I've talked to on this subject both have very valid merit, and that Rachel Cruz, who's Dave Ramsey's daughter, she has a great book called Smart Money, Smart Kids, and she talks about having guidelines where you say, Okay, these are things that you do because you live in this house and you're a part of this family, and this is
how you contribute to the family. These are extra things that you do that you get paid for, and these are your chores that you would do for money kind of a thing the above and beyond, above and beyond, and that's up to you to decide. My favorite thing which I'd love to brag about this right now, I have a thirteen year old who has a job and.
He I love it.
No greater validation has come my way. And I only say this out loud because in my experience being a father, especially talking about father being a father to the public, is you have to take these moments to brag because trust me, the humbling is coming. My sixteen year old's going to get some girl pregnant or something at that level is coming my way. So I have to wallow in this greatness because I used to also brag them
like I can't wait for them to be teenagers. I'm going to thrive as a father, as a father of teenagers. And it was horrible, horrible. I know you did tell you. I know what.
I'm stupid. I'm stupid.
So anyway, he came to me when he was no joke, he was about three and a half and he said, Dad, can I we have like rocks in our landscaping and they get scattered around and I let them to be neat because I'm broken. And he said, can I go put the rocks back where they go for some money? And I said yeah, why and he said, because I'm poor. And I told him the thing that I learned. I said, you're not poor, you're broke a difference, I said, so, but yeah you can.
And that kid went out.
There for three hours and just working as rocks and he wasn't even four years old.
You pay a minimum wage, I in less than I don't go. Yeah, I gave it.
I think I get him five bucks. I think it's what I remember giving him, and uh and so. And now he's grown up and he's got a job, and a big reason why he wants to have a job is because he has a problem saving money. He also gets ten dollars a week from us, like they just get. That's what he gets. And when you turn fifteen, in my house, you bump it up to twenty five dollars
a week, because I learned from my older son. You go out with your friends, you get a girlfriend, you need some more walking around money that you can take him out. But the older one doesn't have a job. He does not have a job, and the younger one loves to remind.
Him of that.
So the older one got a raise. Yeah, well he didn't get a raise. Well you're talking about you just told me when he turned fifteen. He got up to twenty two weeks.
The younger one will get a raise when he turns fifteen. Trust me.
The younger one has no he's been at this job not even a week and a half, and he's already made two hundred bucks.
He gets tips at this ice cream place.
He's gonna be like President Trump, but he's gonna be like, yeah, I'll do that. I'll turn fifteen for nothing, maybe a buck.
You give me a dollar a year.
And it's funny because one of the things that they talk about in this article that one of the psychologists mentions is that you know the doubt there are downsides to your kids having their own money because you can't tell them what to do with it. That's part of and that was my thing when I had My dad made me get a paper out and I was making
four hundred bucks a month at nine years old. If my mom was making something for dinner I didn't like, I would literally order a pizza and just have it delivered to the house.
And oh yeah, that was a brave man. I was stupid, not brave. Stupid.
I thought, well, this is my money, and my and my mom got angry and like went to my dad and he's like, well, it's his money.
What are we going to do? Oh?
My dad would have backed up the moving van. Really, you ought to go live in pizza Land. Pizza Land. I think my dad was proud of it. You said the difference between being poor and being broke. Yes, there's a value in having those moments of brokeness where you don't know what the next thing is going to be.
It's different if you're chronically poor like my parents. My mom's family specifically chronically poor when they were growing up, and I mean to the point where they lived basically the only reason that they made it through is through the generosity of family members and sometimes just friends that they would live with other families. And it wasn't that Grandpa didn't work hard. It's not that they weren't resourceful. It's just that there was a time when it was
legitimately people were legitimately poor. Now, not to say that people aren't any these days, it's just so much more rare. People like to say that they're poor but then they can't figure out why they're you know, sixty five inch television. It doesn't pick up the same channels that everybody.
While you're breaking this down, in my mind, there are two things. Is that I always like this phrase that being poor as a mindset, being broke as a state of being right. And so if you have to really rewire your brain, if you have a and I would equate this like I grew up with a very middle class living and when my dad told me to read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, it really opened my mind to the of like there's a different way of looking at your life in general, and where middle class puts their
money into liabilities, things that cost the money. Upper class, wealthy people put their money into things that make them more money, and that's how they become more wealthy. And just having that little snippet is why I paid my kids each one hundred bucks to read that book and give me like a I did like a book report interview with them, and I think, I hope it's helped them.
It seemed to have so far. But trying to make an investment so that they'll cover your expenses once they get you know, it's a long term play. It's a long term money in the investment. But I the other part.
Was that I'm thinking, I wonder if we're about to see this kind of evolution of what it is to be poor, because life in general has become so luxurious compared to what you know, my grandpa who grew up in the Great Depression, right, the things that I get to live with, you know, having a pretty fair to mid level income, that compared to what he had having no even if you account for inflation, it does not compare. He was a cotton farmer in Texas, you know what
I mean. That was what his family did. His dad had to go work on an oil rig in Texas while him at five and his older brother at nine basically farmed eighty five acres of cotton by themselves. Like that's how little money they had. If I joked, what if I had my kids take care of a four foot by four foot garden in my backyard, There'd be an emotional breakdown.
So I mean, for all the pluses, I don't know, no fruit, they would kill all of it.
My So, like I said, both of my parents grew up at times poor and broke, and that dictated how they went about a how they went about their college education. Dad became a chemist, Mom became a teacher, and they for the most part, they worked all my life. Mom took time off when she had kids, but then by the time I was seven something like that, had gone back to work. So I saw both parents constantly working, and so they made plenty of money, but they never
flaunted it. They never gave us money willy nilly. It was never money was never free in my.
Didn't get an allowance. What about allowance?
But but it was because I was doing things around the house, okay, and there was a regular schedule of things that I would I was to do, and then I they would kind of pimp me out in a weird way.
I'll say that differently.
They would tell neighbors like, hey, here's an able bodied twelve year old to mow your lawn or take out the garbage. Or there were neighbors around the corner. Missus Gibbs was a widow and couldn't mow her lawn and couldn't take out her garbage. So once a week I'd go and I'd mow her lawn and I'd take out the garbage, and she'd pay me four bucks or whatever it was.
Did you hate it like a more than I can say, interesting, more than I could tell. And she was a nice one to your.
Parents and were like, oh God, why do I have to do that? Of course I did, Oh okay, good makes me feel better.
But there was a point when I realized that I'm not doing it just for the four bucks.
I'm doing it to be a good neighbor.
And to you know, this was a woman who was a teacher with my mother from at the time, and then she moved across town. I got I got a bike over there every time, and you know, sometimes when I wasn't there, I'd have to ask a friend if you would go, if he would go do it. So I kind of learned that coordination part of it. But they were My parents never owned a new car. They they bought a.
Not a Cadillac.
They bought a Chrysler right after they got married with some of the money that they had used to or money with some of the money they got when they got married. They bought a Chrysler. And my dad bought a pickup truck. But that was back when the pickup truck was like eight hundred and fifty bucks, and they bought new cars. They rarely bought news cars or new cars. It wasn't until they both retired and they moved and
they had all of this money. I don't mean all of it, but they had money saved down.
Money saved up, and they didn't have expenses in the way of kids that had activities or anything that they needed to take care of. It was just them and so for the risk was mitigated because they could decide what their lifestyle was. When you have kids, your lifestyle kind of is dictated by them a lot. I think it can be, and now I think is much more so than when we were kids. My parents didn't spend money on stuff like I mean, outside of a thirty dollars sign up fee for a little league.
They didn't buy me bats.
Any glove I used was a hand me down from either my dad or from some kid down the street.
Remember the pop order teams had like these big shipping crates filled with all the pads and helmets for everybody, and that's what you got.
And they'd been around for twenty five years.
Yes, every kid that went through your town had more mill shoulder pads before it smelled like it too.
And I was surprised they didn't have like the old leatherhead helmets I still carry back in there somewhere. When my kid played pop order football, I spent four hundred dollars on helmets and shoulder pads.
It's unbelievable.
I mean when I talked to when I was at a baseball fantasy camp, there's a bunch of guys there whose kids, younger kids ten twelve, fourteen are now playing travel baseball stuff. And I was laughing about, oh, yeah, that's that's five hundred bucks you'll never get back. They're like five hundred. We wish it was five hundred. You know that they're paying twenty twenty five hundred dollars every season, not just for a couple of bats for your kid.
You got three or four different uniforms that you are responsible for as the parent. You got to coordinate travel, you got to coordinate hotel stays, You got to in some cases coordinate airfare to get your kids to some tournament in Vegas or in Dallas or whatever. And it just seems unbelievablecause how does a kid at that age understand the sacrifice that you're making monetarily and you like.
Having contempt for them. I have to.
Next year when my younger son goes into the show choir here in Burbank, it's like it's a big thing, like it's the TV show Glee was based on this high school choir. And I told my wife, I realized, I'm going to be spending basically the cost of a used car every year in donating to this program to help fund it. Like it's bananas the amount of money. And so I have to resist the urge to have contempt for them, because there's no way that they understand that that's how much money I'm giving.
No, and they don't. No, really should they like?
Well, And that goes back to the example that I did when I put out you were talking about when I tried to use a physical example to the kids about how much money I made and how much money it costs to live where we lived, and I used a quarter for every.
One every I think it was a thousand. I think you're right. It was a quarter for.
Every thousand dollars I brought in in a month, which isn't a lot.
No, I'm going radio forgots.
So I'd lay that out and then i'd push these quarters over there, and I'd push those quarters over there, and I push those quarters over there, and I would be I would I'd be left with like, instead of fifty cents, I'd be left with like twenty dimesents. This is what I got left to do everything else, which includes your games, your see your movies, and all the luxury, all that stuff. And I still don't know if they get it.
You don't think they do. I do want to say that this always comes up, and I love this. The Harvard Grant study was the longest longitudal study in American history where they've looked back, and the common thread that they have with most successful business people and.
CEOs is that they did chores as a kid.
The experts that I talked to suggest that bare minimum, You give some kind of an allowance to your kid, bare minimum, so that they understand they have a limit on their funds, and they start to work those neurons in problem solving that as early as five, but definitely by the time they're about ten. And then they say that you can do like one dollar for every year, for every week, so a ten year old will get ten bucks a week from you in the form of an allowance.
I'm behind that. I have a thirteen year old who gets ten bucks a week.
Yeah, but he's gonna get a he's got a job, he's doing great.
And then anyway, I was looking at this study and this mom had this great comment where she said, my mom always had this great line where she said, if you're old enough to afford therapy, you're too old to blame your parents for your problems.
I don't want to get that on a T shirt. So much dusting, great stuff. Thank you appreciating