Your Money
By RON LIEBER
When Scott Parker wanted his six offspring to know more about the value of money, he decided to do something that many parents would consider radical: show them exactly what he earned.
One day, he stopped by his local Wells Fargo branch in Encinitas, Calif., and asked to withdraw his entire monthly salary in cash. In singles. It took 24 hours for the tellers to round up that many bills, so he returned the next day and took away the $100 stacks in a canvas bag.
His oldest son, Daniel, who was 15 at the time, remembers the moment his father walked into the house and dumped the $10,000 or so on a table. “It looked like he had robbed a bank,” he said.
See More »
–
His son, Daniel, is now an adult and has two small children. He and his wife intend to share their financial information with their children as they grow.
“He had little tolerance for entitlement in any of us,” Daniel said of his father. Scott Parker did have confidence that his children would know what to do with the information he had literally dumped onto the table.
“I wasn’t swearing anyone to secrecy,” he said. “But I can tell you, it never became an issue. I figure that whatever the risk was, it was worth it.”
This is adapted from the book “The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money,” by Ron Lieber, to be published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, in February.
On Monday at noon Eastern, columnist Ron Lieber will answer questions about how families can talk about finances on The Times’s Facebook page.
