Your Kids Are Watching and Learning About Money from You

Back when we started our first business, I bought a single share of dozens of companies – probably upwards of 50 to 100 individual securities – and had them framed for my office wall.  I didn’t think of them as investments, but rather as part of the office decor budget.  The whole thing only cost a few thousand dollars but I loved being surrounded by reminders that our goal was to build a business that would last a long time, pay dividends to members, grow our wealth, protect against inflation, serve our customers, and (I hope) live far beyond my own lifetime.  

The accountants quickly became frustrated with the constant stream of dividend reinvestments of 10¢ here and 70¢ there.  It was far too complicated to track all those fractional positions for what amounted to a relative meaningless economic asset.  We then turned off most the reinvestment for those framed shares, but this lead to an odd situation where a transfer agent will spend 44¢ to mail a dividend check that might be a fraction of that amount.  

As part of this six-month project, one of the “little irritations” I want fixed was to have each of these checks direct deposited into the general CCDA account so I never had to see them.  The bad part was that I had setup instructions years ago that I was the only authorized agent of the company for these particular securities.  That means I had to fix it, personally.  It would only take a couple of hours, but I kept throwing it onto the low priority file until I could get around to correcting it.

Then, something funny happened.  My young niece?  The one I’m teaching about money?  She and her mom stopped by the other day.  Knowing I was going to start working on this project, there was a pile of these small dividend checks. She noticed and wanted to understand what they were. The questions became a teaching opportunity.

So much is learned in families and communities through osmosis; knowledge, skill sets, behaviors that open doors and make possible things that those on the outside don’t even realize exist. Your relationship to money and time are among the most important of those lessons. What you do – what they observe – is so much money important than what you say.