Photo Credit |
Benjamin: So Dad, how often does the bank pay me for keeping my money in the savings account?
Dad: Well, they pay you once a quarter - that's once every 3 months.
Benjamin: How much did they pay me for the last quarter.
Dad: Hmmm. Let's check your bank statement. Right here, they made a quarterly interest payment to you for 12 cents.
Benjamin: (long silence) Umm, Dad, can I use twenty dollars of my savings to buy a Star Wars LEGO set I've had my eyes on?
This is going to be harder than I thought, but honestly, the incentive is not there to save. With inflation you are losing money. Even a kid knows it's probably smarter to spend it. We did discuss risk and reward and I showed him that you can definitely make a higher rate of return in the stock market, but the risks of loss are much greater.
Benjamin is motivated, however, and figured out that collecting cans can be a money making venture. He researched and found that it takes 31 cans to make a pound of aluminum and that the going rate is $0.40 per pound, so it takes about 80 cans to make a dollar. I don't know about where you live, but people throw many "dollars" out of their window around my house and Benjamin aims to pick them up and convert them into profit. Cha ching!
So he asked me to go walking down the road with him yesterday, pulling a wagon and picking up cans. Off we went. As we walked about a mile down the road and back, picking up cans, we had a good chance to talk about life, how home school is going and we also observed many things, including:
#1 Why do people litter? I don't have an answer to that question, but I remember when someone threw paper out of the car window and it fell at the feet of this guy and it made him sad (Remember that?):
Photo Credit |
Losing his land |
Goldenrods in front of the house |
Native Americans chewed the leaves of a young goldenrod to relieve sore throats and chewed the roots to relieve toothaches. Who knew? I have a pharmacy in the roadside ditch across from my house!
Full of flowers and sticky pollen - our bees love this stuff! |
After about 30 minutes we collected about 93 cans or roughly $1.16.
Precious metals |
We crushed the cans as we pick them up to conserve space. Once we got home, we dumped them out and counted them.
93 crushed aluminum cans |
Not a whole lot of value there. Neither me or Benjamin will be getting rich off of what we picked up in the ditch in 30 minutes. The real value, though, came in time spent with him along the way - a great investment in my book.
No comments:
Post a Comment