money

Leave a comment Posted on parenting, Storytelling

New Book: Three Cups (Give, Save, Spend)

November 23, 2011 at 7:42 pm , by 

One year.

I’ve read that my generation (people who are currently around age 30) will be much like our great-grandparents, who lived through The Great Depression.

As history repeats itself, we shall become society’s new shrewd penny pinchers to our kids that our great-grandparents were to our grandparents.

We will remember back in the 2010′s when the only way you could sell your house was to basically pay someone to buy it from you. Back when we were anxiety-ridden anytime we had to pick up a sick child from daycare for fearing of jeopardizing our jobs.

Thankfully, there are talented financial gurus like Dave Ramsey to help us to simply and legitimately figure out how to manage our money. In my personal life, which has been dramatically featured here on The Dadabase, I have had to learn some tough lessons about money:

Buy an espresso maker and save Starbucks only for special occasions. Avoid eating out at restaurants as much as possible. Don’t move back to your hometown to be close to family when your first child is born because you nor your wife will be able to get a job there. You will end up blowing through your savings just to survive until you ultimately have to move back to Nashville. Just keep your good job in the big city and suffer putting your child in daycare.

You know; little lessons like that.

When it comes to life lessons about money, I have been shamed, I have been humbled, and I have been made a wiser person because of my uneducated decisions.

I have survived my own Great Depression of 2010 and now every single cent I earn has a place. I say “no” a lot more to people. I don’t worry about hurting feelings by doing so. I know if I don’t tell my money where to go, it will tell me where to go.

Just in time, Tommy Nelson Publishing has released the perfect book for us to help kids learn how to manage their money; from a very young age.

This is a book I definitely feel should be mandatory reading for all young children, but more importantly, it should be mandatory for all parents to read and discuss this book with their children… regularly.

The book is simply called Three Cups. I don’t want to totally give the story line away, but basically, on a boy’s 5th birthday his parents give him three cups. As he begins earning an allowance, he becomes responsible for deciding how much money he wants to give away, save for the future, and spend. Accordingly, the three cups serve as appropriate piggy banks for the three categories: give, save, and spend.

In the likeness of 25% of all of Brad Paisley’s songs, the book ends with the now grown-up boy reliving the story through his own 5 year-old son. It’s perfect.

Three Cups even comes with a Parent’s Guide to help us individually talk to our kids about the book’s lessons.

Needless to say, I strongly personally endorse this book. It couldn’t be more appropriate in every way. Even the illustrations are right on. I love the disappointed look on the boy’s face when he first sees that his parents got him three cups for his birthday.

Buy it. Read it to your kids. Give them three cups.

Here’s the website for Three Cups:

www.3cupsbook.com

 

2 Comments Posted on Nostalgia, Spirituality, Storytelling, Uncategorized

How Teddy Ruxpin Subliminally Taught Me the Generation Y Trait of Being Motivated By Happiness, Not Money

Whether you are motivated more by wealth or happiness, it’s still a pursuit.  No guarantees for either one.

Maybe Teddy Ruxpin is the reason why today I prefer vests over neckties. Back in the Eighties, all my friends would put their fingers and pencils and crayons in their Teddy Ruxpin doll’s mouth when he talked- but my mom wouldn’t let me do that to mine because she said it would mess up his mouth. She was right. My Teddy Ruxpin worked fine for years and years after my friends’ Teddy Ruxpins ultimately broke down for good. Since Kindergarten (1986) I have been having brief flashbacks of this live-action puppet after-school special of The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin I saw once where he and Grubby fly in an airship to find a hidden treasure and get captured by mud people.

Recently, some hero posted the one hour made-for-TV movie on YouTube. I watched it all the way through. Teddy Ruxpin and his friends discover a room full of golden treasures but choose instead to take only these crystal necklaces with words like “truth”, “honesty”, and “bravery” on them. Because “these things are the real treasures”. Right. Of course.  Then the bad guys take the real treasure (gold), but because their attitudes were wrong, the tresure vanishes into thin air once they touch it.

Golden treasures are typically a let-down in movies and TV shows, for the most part at least. From what I remember about most “treasure hunt” movies, the heroes ends up choosing some kind of abstract moral principle over the actual golden treasure, which is actually a trap or illusion for the villain. The only semi-exception I know of is the movie Without a Paddle. They get the moral treasure (which in this case was “life itself”) and also $100,000 cash, which the two richer friends give to the poorer friend.

Usually I am pretty quick to pick up on recycled plots, but it’s taken me until just recently to realize this one about “the real treasure”.  Interestingly, in my research about Generation Y (people born from 1982 and 2001), I learned that one of their main characteristics is that “being happy” is their main motivational drive, not money or wealth, as is the case with many of the older generations.  I would have to believe it was this common “love/life/joy is better than gold” theme in entertainment during the Eighties and Nineties that has something to do with the way Generation Y is wired.  Though I was born in 1981, I was still born close enough to the generational switch that I admit my main motivation in life is happiness, not material wealth.  And maybe that’s dangerous- because for some people, finding financial success could actually be easier than finding perceived happiness.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”  –John Milton

Leave a comment Posted on People, Spirituality, Storytelling, Uncategorized

Why Money is Funny, Honey

The numbers are real… only because we believe in them.

Antique dealers and E-Bay auctioneers are quite familiar with the fact that the value of an item is simply based on what a person is willing to pay for it. It had to have been confusing when the Native American Indians learned of the Europeans’ obsession with gold, which to them was just another type of metal. There was nothing special about it. But because gold still has value in our economy, we can relate to our European ancestors. Not only have we been trained to associate gold with prosperity, but gold literally does equal monetary wealth.

If only ancient civilization decided that dinosaur fossils should have been the currency, we would put our faith in a completely different rare, inanimate object. It is truly eye-opening, amazing, and disappointing to realize that money itself is simply just a touchable version of the invisible system set in place. Money isn’t real. Our government can print millions more in a just a few minutes, when they choose to. Our faith in the system is what gives money its worth.

A dollar is worth a dollar because we believe it. Same thing with a million. And while each decade inflation alters the value to a degree, we keep enough faith for the system to stay legitimate.

What made this “invisible money” concept even more real for me is when I got a debit card a few years ago. No longer having to go to the bank every Friday during my lunch break to withdraw cash, I could just simply swipe my card to make a purchase, then later check online to see the numbers get a little smaller. The Numbers.

Money is invisible numbers. But while money isn’t real, these numbers still completely affect our lifestyles. So they are real.

Faith makes an invisible economy real.

6 Comments Posted on Nostalgia, Recaps, Spirituality, Storytelling, Uncategorized

Metaphors in Super Mario Bros. that Taught Us about Real Life

How many lives do you have left before it’s “game over”?

Something that Super Mario Bros. taught us first, more so than any other video game, was the concept of having “lives”.  If you fell in a hole (which means you instantly died; no chance that the hole wasn’t really that deep or that you could have grabbed on to a branch while falling), you lost a life.  If you touched an enemy, you lost a life (which is completely irrational; I wonder what would happen if Mario touched a “frenemy”?…). If you ran out of time, you lost a life (okay, I admit, that concept is somewhat lifelike).

However, if you accomplished certain goals to better yourself, like ate a healthy mushroom(this promoted organic a lifestyle), saved 100 coins (which causes the game to most likely be endorsed by Dave Ramsey), kicked a turtle shell that slid into 10 enemies (illogical and scientifically impossible on so many levels), or jumped to the top of a flagpole (because that’s normal in real life), you actually would get a “1 Up”, which means that you gained an extra life.

But the whole point of this game, despite collecting gold coins (which instantly disappeared when you touched them- could that be a metaphor symbolizing how money is meaningless?) and muddling through everyday distractions (like busting bricks with your fist because you thought there was a steel box with an “invincibility star” inside- choose your own metaphor for life on that one…) was to save the princess from the evil mutant dragon named Koopa.

If you could run under the dragon in the final castle when he jumped up while breathing fire and hammers at you, you instantly touched an axe that caused the bridge to collapse, therefore sending the dragon into the fiery lava pit (poor architectural planning, if you ask me…). In the next room, the famous princess was waiting to be saved from captivity.  In other words, despite being responsible by saving money, despite gaining power, despite becoming a hero to anyone, it’s all really about helping other people.

Cool Retro Sunday School Bonus!

And for those from a Protestant background, the Mushroom Kingdom represents the Heavenly Kingdom, the dragon symbolizes Satan who will be hurled into the lake of fire in the end, and saving the princess symbolizes sharing Christ’s message of salvation and loving others as ourselves, which is the summary of Ephesians 2:8-10, and in my opinion, the meaning of life and the whole point of Christianity.

3 Comments Posted on Uncategorized, Writing

My Categories: Nostalgia, People, Storytelling, Spirituality, Writing, and Recaps

What’s my writing style?  Spumoni.

If I was smart, I would listen to the authors of “how to be a writer” and “how to have a popular website” books when they clearly tell me, “Find your niche and just focus on it alone.”  Then I could be like the fortunate clever-minded writers who all now have book deals simply because of the popularity of their WordPress websites:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/

http://stuffchristianslike.net/

http://1000awesomethings.com/

Here’s the problem though- I’m not attracting just one type of reader.  I’m luring in several different types of people who are both completely unrelated to each other and yet at other times couldn’t be more alike.  It sort of reminds me of the way that MSN’s home page (http://www.msn.com/) is set up.  Their main categories are news, entertainment, sports, money, and lifestyle.

By default, I have ended up emulating that concept, only mixing it up with my own alternative, off-beat main topics.  Instead of the mainstream-friendly Neapolitan (chocolate-strawberry-vanilla) topics, my twisted version is more like Spumoni (chocolate-pistachio-cherry). *Ironically, Spumoni came first (from Italy), but by the time it became popular in America, it evolved into Neapolitan.

I have come to the conclusion that there are ultimately six main categories I write about: nostalgia, people, storytelling, spirituality, writing, and recaps (of TV shows, mainly).  (“Uncategorized” is an additional generic title given to all my posts as well.)

Of course I struggled with making “Jewish references” and “humor” their own separate categories, but just like a few other “should I make these their own categories?” categories, certain topics aren’t simply things I write about; they’re a part of everything I write.  It would just simply be redundant; stating the obvious.

Being able to read through an entire one of my posts without coming across the words “Jew”, “Jews”, or “Jewish” somewhere in there is about as rare as biting all the way through a Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookie without eating a chocolate chip.  And I would hope that there is at least a little bit of irony that comes across as humorous in most of what I write as well.  I shouldn’ have to label it “funny”, otherwise I may be defeating the purpose.

So who am I attracting on a daily basis?

Fans of LOST, Dexter, The Bachelor, and/or The Bachelorette.  Jewish people.  Christians.  People who grew up in the 1980’s.  People concerned with healthy living.   People who found my website by searching one of those things and then saved my website in their “Favorites” and forwarded the link on to their friends.

In other words, my readers are as random as I am.  Random Spumoni.  Takes one to know one.  Welcome to the club.