\u201cWhere did you get all that money?!?\u201d I asked my daughter. We were leaving my mother\u2019s house and she had a handful of cash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know. Grandma Evie gave it to me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cFor what?\u201d I asked. \u201cI\u2019m her son! I didn\u2019t get any money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cShe asked me to clip some grape vines, and she gave me $30 for it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThirty dollars!\u201d I replied. No, actually I didn\u2019t \u201creply.\u201d I spat! A combination of horrified and disgusted. \u201cIt only took you like 5 minutes. Why did she give you $30?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe because I had to climb a ladder? Like hazard pay. All I know is I sure wasn\u2019t going to turn down $30.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, to be a kid again. No, not even a kid. My child is 16. A teenager for sure. But she still makes \u201ckid cash.\u201d You know, when family \u2013 and I\u2019m talking grandparents especially \u2013 shower you in money for simple, and sometimes silly, reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLook how well he breathed his air!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDid you see how she walked around that ant hill? I\u2019m giving her $5!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou petted the kitty so nicely. Here\u2019s the mortgage to my house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WHAT?!?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ohhhh \u2026 to be a kid. When you could make money \u2013 sometimes BIG money \u2013 with so little effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grandparents always did this \u201ckid cash\u201d way more than parents. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But grandkids have it made. My nephew is 8, which means he can really rake in the cash. \u201cStriker, I will give you $1 for each weed you pull,\u201d my mother will tell him. For some reason he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which is part of the problem: Where in the REAL world can you get an offer like that? \u201cKid cash\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think I\u2019m going to start working at Grandma Evie\u2019s,\u201d my daughter once said. \u201cThe money is just too good to pass up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But that\u2019s not a REAL job! It might actually be extortion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOK, so if we stand on a street corner and smile at people, they\u2019ll probably just give us money, right?\u201d one of us would propose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNo. Standing is a lot of work. Maybe we sit in beach chairs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It wasn\u2019t until college that I realized normal people don\u2019t actually pay you to eat all their foil-wrapped candy and then hope you go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Financially, the real world has been a struggle ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, enjoy it while you can, young buggers. Your high-rolling glory days won\u2019t last forever. The cash spigot will eventually run dry, and you\u2019ll be left like the rest of us: Crashing down to earth where $360 an hour is a fool\u2019s dream and you can\u2019t just get away with a few snips on a grape vine. You\u2019ll be trading your king\u2019s riches for stewed chicken thighs before you know it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWhere did you get all that money?!?\u201d I asked my daughter. We were leaving my mother\u2019s house and she had a handful of cash.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know. Grandma Evie gave it to me,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
\u201cFor what?\u201d I asked. \u201cI\u2019m her son! I didn\u2019t get any money.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cShe asked me to clip some grape vines, and she gave me $30 for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThirty dollars!\u201d I replied. No, actually I didn\u2019t \u201creply.\u201d I spat! A combination of horrified and disgusted. \u201cIt only took you like 5 minutes. Why did she give you $30?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe because I had to climb a ladder? Like hazard pay. All I know is I sure wasn\u2019t going to turn down $30.\u201d<\/p>\n
Oh, to be a kid again. No, not even a kid. My child is 16. A teenager for sure. But she still makes \u201ckid cash.\u201d You know, when family \u2013 and I\u2019m talking grandparents especially \u2013 shower you in money for simple, and sometimes silly, reasons. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[579,562,561],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2022-nutshells","category-childhood","category-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2378"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2381,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2378\/revisions\/2381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nutshellcity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}