“Where did you get all that money?!?” I asked my daughter. We were leaving my mother’s house and she had a handful of cash.
“I don’t know. Grandma Evie gave it to me,” she said.
“For what?” I asked. “I’m her son! I didn’t get any money.”
“She asked me to clip some grape vines, and she gave me $30 for it.”
“Thirty dollars!” I replied. No, actually I didn’t “reply.” I spat! A combination of horrified and disgusted. “It only took you like 5 minutes. Why did she give you $30?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe because I had to climb a ladder? Like hazard pay. All I know is I sure wasn’t going to turn down $30.”
Oh, to be a kid again. No, not even a kid. My child is 16. A teenager for sure. But she still makes “kid cash.” You know, when family – and I’m talking grandparents especially – shower you in money for simple, and sometimes silly, reasons.
“Look how well he breathed his air!”
“Did you see how she walked around that ant hill? I’m giving her $5!”
“You petted the kitty so nicely. Here’s the mortgage to my house.”
WHAT?!?
Ohhhh … to be a kid. When you could make money – sometimes BIG money – with so little effort.
As a kid, you were always getting bucks for the most mundane and ridiculous things. I used to get an allowance from my Cuban grandmother. For the life of me, I can’t remember a single useful thing I ever did at her house. It seemed like all I did there was eat a bowl full of Hershey’s Kisses and annoy her. We knew she was really mad when she started cursing at my brother and me in Spanish. Maybe the allowance was to get us to go away.
Grandparents always did this “kid cash” way more than parents. I don’t ever remember my mother being so generous with us on projects around the house. As little boys, my brother and I would help bring home a brownstone worth of bricks and then lay them beneath the grape vine arbor. Our payment? A dinner of stewed chicken thighs.
But grandkids have it made. My nephew is 8, which means he can really rake in the cash. “Striker, I will give you $1 for each weed you pull,” my mother will tell him. For some reason he’s not that into money, and has a short attention span, so he usually ends up with only 25 cents. But I could do some serious damage with an offer like that.
Which is part of the problem: Where in the REAL world can you get an offer like that? “Kid cash” jobs always left you with a skewed view of money and how it works. How easy it is to get. Thirty bucks for 5 minutes of work? If my math can be trusted, that would break down to $360 an hour. $2,880 a day. A whopping $14,400 a week. Tax-free! And someone else is covering your medical and dental.
“I think I’m going to start working at Grandma Evie’s,” my daughter once said. “The money is just too good to pass up.”
But that’s not a REAL job! It might actually be extortion.
As a kid, you got it in your head that it was real. That something as simple as annoying your grandmother and then getting paid for it was a skill you could monetize. Even get rich from.
My brother and I grew up with a horribly unhealthy view of work and the value of cash. We always dreamed up get-rich schemes that involved no effort on our part, but would bring in money by the truckload.
“OK, so if we stand on a street corner and smile at people, they’ll probably just give us money, right?” one of us would propose.
“No. Standing is a lot of work. Maybe we sit in beach chairs.”
It wasn’t until college that I realized normal people don’t actually pay you to eat all their foil-wrapped candy and then hope you go away.
Financially, the real world has been a struggle ever since.
So, enjoy it while you can, young buggers. Your high-rolling glory days won’t last forever. The cash spigot will eventually run dry, and you’ll be left like the rest of us: Crashing down to earth where $360 an hour is a fool’s dream and you can’t just get away with a few snips on a grape vine. You’ll be trading your king’s riches for stewed chicken thighs before you know it.