Lunch Money (2 page)

By the time he got to third grade, Greg had
set himself a goal. He wanted to be rich. He thought it would be fantastic to be able to spend all the money he wanted, anytime he felt like it. If he wanted to get the world's fastest computer plus a hundred of the best games, no problem. If he wanted a car, a speedboat, a house in the mountains, a home-theater system, or even a whole island out in the middle of the Pacific—plus his own seaplane and a private crew to fly him there—no problem. Greg was sure that someday he'd be able to get anything he wanted. All he'd need was money.

And he wasn't that different from his friends. A lot of them also dreamed about getting rich, and some of them wanted to be famous, too. Greg didn't care much about fame. What was the point? Besides, he figured that if he got rich enough, really superrich, then the famous part would happen automatically anyway. But there was one big difference between Greg and most of his friends. He wasn't just dreaming about getting rich. He was working at it.

As Greg reached third grade and then fourth, his whole neighborhood had become
the land of opportunity. He was thin, but wiry, and strong enough to tackle any job he put his mind to. Greg raked and bagged leaves in the fall and again in the spring. He washed cars all spring, summer, and fall, and on hot days he sold lemonade. He shoveled snow and salted icy sidewalks in the winter. Greg became a feeder of cats, a walker of dogs, and a collector of mail and newspapers for people on vacation. He swept garages and straightened up messy basements. If people ever decided to throw things away, Greg kept the good stuff for himself and hauled it home to his own little corner of the Kenton family garage. And when he had collected enough interesting junk, Greg would drag it all out to the end of the driveway, put up a sign, and hold a sale. Neighborhood money filled Greg's pockets the way rain fills puddles.

For example, consider what Greg earned just from shoveling snow. He had eight customers within two blocks of his house, and every time it snowed, he shoveled their front walks for a flat rate: ten dollars. The winter of his third-grade year, it snowed six times, and the winter of his fourth-grade year it snowed
five times. And eleven snowfalls times eight customers equals eighty-eight shovel sessions, times ten dollars for each one equals
eight hundred and eighty dollars
—which isn't just a lot of money to a nine-year-old. Eight hundred and eighty dollars is a lot of money to anybody.

It hadn't taken Greg long to become the family banker. If his mom and dad were running late for a movie on a Saturday night, Greg was happy to lend them twenty dollars—as long as they signed his little record book and promised to repay the money. And his parents got special treatment. They didn't have to pay Greg's usual lending fees. After all, they didn't charge him for the food he ate, or for the safe, warm bed he slept in every night. So that seemed fair. But his two brothers had to pay the regular rates.

If his older brother needed an extra five dollars to get that new baseball glove in time to break it in before the Babe Ruth tryouts, Greg was happy to lend him the money—as long as Edward signed the book and promised to pay back the five dollars one week later,
plus
a fifty-cent fee—
and
Greg got the old mitt as part of the deal, because a used baseball glove
might be worth something at his next driveway sale. And if Ross just
had
to have that hot new CD the instant it arrived at the music store, he knew his little brother would be happy to help—for a fee.

Both Ross and Edward made fun of Greg's moneymaking schemes. They called him Scrooge and Mr. Cashman and Old Moneybags, and some other nicknames too. Still, whenever they needed money, they knew they would always be welcome at the First Family Bank of Greg.

One Thursday shortly after Greg had finished fourth grade, his dad pulled a reference book off a shelf next to the computer in the family room. Along with the information he'd been looking for, he also found twelve five-dollar bills tucked between the pages. Only one person in the family could have owned that money, so at bedtime that night, he told Greg that he'd found it.

Greg sat straight up in bed. “You put it all back, right?”

His dad said, “Absolutely.

But how about we go to the bank on Saturday morning and open up a savings
account? That's where your money belongs.”

Greg had looked at him suspiciously. “Why?” “Because your money will be safe at the bank, and it'll be there when you need it. Like when you go to college.”

Greg said, “But can I get my money out before then? Like if I see something I need at a yard sale?”

His dad nodded. “You're allowed to get your money anytime you want. But if you take the money out of the bank, then the money won't grow.”

“‘Grow'?” said Greg. “You mean ‘earn interest,' right?”

A little surprised, his dad had nodded and said, “Right. Earn interest. If you put a hundred dollars in the bank and leave it there for one year, the bank will add five dollars more to it, so then you'll have a hundred and five dollars. That's called earning five percent interest a year. And all the money has to do is sit there. Pretty neat, huh?”

Greg thought about that. “So my money just sits there?”

His dad said, “Well, actually, the bank will probably lend your money to other people, and
then those other people will pay the bank interest for being able to use it—just like the bank pays you that five dollars of interest so that it can use
your
money.”

Greg said, “And I only get
five dollars
if I let the bank use my
hundred
dollars for a whole year? That stinks. Because if I spend two dollars on lemon juice and sugar and paper cups, and if I sell thirty cups of lemonade this weekend, then in one weekend I'll make more money than the bank would pay me all year.”

“That's true,” his dad said. “Making your own business investments is a way to earn more money faster—as long as you make good investments. But if you keep hiding money around the house, it could get lost. Or stolen.”

“But what about your comic books?” Greg asked. “You keep your whole collection right here in the house.”

His dad nodded. “True, but I've got an insurance policy on them, and a special policy on the most valuable ones. And if something happened to my comics, the insurance company would pay me back the money they're worth. But you can't get an insurance policy on money itself—unless you keep it in a bank. So if our
house burned down, you'd have no money at all—none. And you'd get nothing back.”

That got Greg's attention.

The next day Greg had retrieved money from about thirty different hiding places around the house and yard and garage. And on Saturday morning he'd gone to the bank and opened his own savings account with a first deposit that amazed his dad—more than three thousand two hundred dollars. And that wasn't even all of Greg's money, just most of it. He'd kept a couple hundred dollars at home, because Greg already understood that sometimes a business person needs money right away.

By age eleven he was well on his way to success, always on the lookout for new money-making opportunities. And then one day Greg Kenton made the greatest financial discovery of his young life.

 

 

 

It was near the end of his fifth-grade year. Around eleven thirty one morning during silent reading Greg felt hungry, so he had started to think about his lunch: a ham-and-cheese sandwich, a bag of nacho cheese Doritos, a bunch of red grapes, and an apple-cherry juice box.

His mom had made him a bag lunch, which was fine with Greg. Making a lunch was a lot cheaper than buying one, and Greg loved saving money whenever possible. Plus home food was usually better than school food. And on days he brought a bag lunch his mom also gave him fifty cents to buy dessert. Which was also fine with Greg. Sometimes he bought a treat, and sometimes he held on to the money. On this particular day he had been planning to spend both quarters on an ice-cream sandwich.

Then Greg remembered where his lunch
was: at home on the kitchen counter. He did have a dollar of his own money in his wallet, and he had two quarters from his mom in his front pocket, but a whole school lunch cost two bucks. He needed two more quarters.

So Greg had walked to the front of the classroom, waited until his teacher looked up from her book, and then said, “Mrs. McCormick, I left my lunch at home. May I borrow fifty cents?”

Mrs. McCormick had not missed a teaching opportunity in over twenty years. So she shook her head, and in a voice loud enough for the whole class to hear, she said, “I'm sorry, but no, I will not lend you money. Do you know what would happen if I handed out fifty cents to all the boys and girls who forgot their lunches? I'd go broke, that's what. You need to learn to remember these things for yourself.”

Then, turning to the class, Mrs. McCormick had announced, “Greg needs some lunch money. Can someone lend him fifty cents?”

Over half of the kids in the class raised a hand.

Embarrassed, Greg had hurried over to
Brian Lemont, and Brian handed him two quarters.

“Thanks,” Greg said. “Pay you back tomorrow.” Ten minutes later Greg was in the cafeteria line, shaking all four quarters around in his pocket. They made a nice clinking sound, and that had reminded Greg how much he liked quarters. Stack up four, and you've got a dollar. Stack up twenty quarters, and that's five dollars. Greg remembered one day when he had piled up all his quarters on his dresser—four stacks, and each had been over a foot tall. Stacking up quarters like that always made Greg feel rich.

So on that day in April of his fifth-grade year, Greg had started looking around the cafeteria, and everywhere he looked, he saw quarters. He saw kids trading quarters for ice-cream sandwiches and cupcakes and cookies at the dessert table. He saw kids over at the school store trading quarters for neon pens and sparkly pencils, and for little decorations like rubber soccer balls and plastic butterflies to stick onto the ends of those new pencils. He saw Albert Hobart drop three quarters into a machine so he could have a cold can of juice with his lunch. Kids were buying extra food, fancy pens and
pencils, special drinks and snacks. There were quarters all over the place,
buckets
of them.

And then Greg remembered those hands that had been raised back in his classroom, all those kids who'd had a couple of quarters to lend him—
extra
quarters.

Excited, Greg had started making some calculations in his head—another one his talents. There were about 450 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at Ashworth Intermediate School. If even
half
of those kids had two extra quarters to spend every day, then there had to be at least
four hundred
quarters floating around the school. That was a hundred dollars a day, over
five hundred dollars
each week—money,
extra
money, just jingling around in pockets and lunch bags!

At that moment Greg's view of school changed completely and forever. School had suddenly become the most interesting place on the planet. Because young Greg Kenton had decided that school would be an excellent place to make his fortune.