Dave Barry's Money Secrets

by Dave Barry

  Never allow a child to spend all of his allowance. Insist that he set aside a certain amount of money every week and put it in a safe place, where you can get it if you need to buy beer.

  Encourage the Child to Develop an Entrepreneurial Spirit

  Many children learn about money by starting their own businesses, the classic example being the sidewalk lemonade stand. This is an opportunity to teach your child fundamental economic principles. I’m not suggesting that you encourage your child to have a lemonade stand; that’s WAY too much work. I’m suggesting that you explain to your child that if he buys lemonade from some other kid’s stand, and then happens to choke on a lemon seed, then you would be in a position to sue the other kid’s parents for thousands of dollars. That is what I mean by “fundamental economic principles.”

  But whatever else you teach your child, the most important lesson that you, as a parent, can impart is that money is not everything. There are more important things in life than money—things like spirituality, knowledge, friendship, and, above all, family. These are the things that truly bring happiness.

  So, on second thought, two dollars a week is plenty.

  10

  PROVIDING FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S COLLEGE EDUCATIONS

  The Hell with It

  THE MOST PRECIOUS GIFT that a parent can give to a child—more precious than material things such as diamonds, or gold, or a big mansion—is a big mansion filled with diamonds and gold.

  Alas, most of us cannot afford to give this to our children, so we must settle for sending them to college. We’re giving them the gift of knowledge, which is also precious, especially in these modern “high-tech” times. Take computers. Today, if you don’t know how to operate a computer,* 25 you’re limiting yourself to a lifetime of manual labor in a boring, menial, “dead-end” job such as professional golfer or porn star. Whereas, if you can operate a computer, chances are that you will become an employee of a large corporation that will let you have your very own cubicle space, where you may be permitted to put up small photographs of your children or dog until such time as your job is outsourced to Kuala Lumpur.

  This is the gift that you give when you give your child a college education. Unfortunately, college costs money, unless your child is really good at football or basketball, in which case good-hearted knowledge-loving strangers will cover all your child’s educational needs, including a sport utility vehicle.

  But chances are you’ll have to pay for your child’s college education. This is a problem if your child wants to go to a top college such as Harvard, where tuition is currently $37,500 per . . .

  . . . no, wait, while I was writing that sentence it went up, so now it’s $38,928 per . . .

  . . . no, hold on, it just went up again, and now it’s $40,2 . . .

  OK, never mind. There is simply no way, using currently available technology, to keep track of the rising cost of sending a child to Harvard or other Ivy League school. Why are Ivy League schools so expensive? Simple: They hire the smartest professors in the world, and these professors do nothing* 26 but sit around thinking up ways to jack up tuition.

  The pioneer in this effort was Princeton University, which in 1932 hired Albert Einstein to work on the tuition problem. At the time, a semester at Princeton cost $16.75, which included a class beanie and a manservant. After studying the situation, Einstein developed the General Theory of Relativity, which states: “People in general will pay any amount of money to be able to tell their relatives that their child goes to Princeton.”

  This remains the fundamental underlying economic principle behind Ivy League tuitions. Researchers at Yale, using a supercomputer, recently concluded that there is “theoretically no upper limit” to how much parents are willing to pay to send their children to an Ivy League school. Dartmouth seems to be proving this with its Tuition + Organ Program (TOP), which requires that each semester’s tuition payment be accompanied by a functional human kidney.

  “It’s amazing,” reports a Dartmouth official. “We figured that, between Mom and Dad, each set of parents would be good for a maximum of four kidneys, but darned if they’re not coming up with more! God only knows how.”

  And that’s what’s going on today. The situation is only going to get worse. Let’s say you have a child in kindergarten now. By the time that child enters college, at the rate things are going, he or she will have tattoos the size of doormats. Also tuition will be really high.

  So we know that sending your child to a good school will cost a lot of money. What does this mean? It means that, as a responsible parent, you need to start planning now. I don’t mean planning how to pay for a good college: I mean planning how to get your child to go to a mediocre or actively bad college.

  Your best bet, of course, is low grades. A child with a crappy grade-point average is almost guaranteed not to get into a good school. But bad grades don’t just happen by themselves. You need to closely monitor your child’s study habits and set strict guidelines. (“There will be no studying until after you’ve watched your five hours of television, young man!”)

  You must also be alert for subtle signs that your child is secretly becoming involved in academics, such as:

  • Hiding books under the mattress

  • Using big words such as “curriculum” and “dormitory”

  • Hanging around with friends who make eye contact with you and speak in complete sentences

  • Disappearing from the house for hours at a time, “coincidentally” on school days

  You have to watch your child like a hawk, because these young people can be very sneaky. In one chilling case, a mother—a mother who held the confident belief, based on all outward evidence, that her son was a complete loser—happened to look in his closet, and to her horror found not only applications to MIT and Stanford but also a working cold-fusion nuclear reactor. Fortunately, before this woman and her husband were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, they were able to stage an intervention, which involved forcing their son to play video games while listening to hip-hop music for eighty straight hours. Difficult?* 27 Yes. But it paid off: Today that same young man is working as an assistant night manager at a Wendy’s.

  OK, let’s say that, thanks to strict parental discipline and hard work, you have positioned your child to attend a mediocre, low-prestige college with reasonable tuition rates. The question now becomes: Which low-prestige college should your child attend? And how can you be sure it’s mediocre? Here are some factors you need to consider, in order of importance:

  1. Length of college name. The longer the name, the more mediocre and reasonably priced the college is likely to be. Thus you want to avoid colleges with names like “Smith” or “Brown,” and look instead at colleges with names like “The Earl T. Bunderson Greater Tri-City Area Community College of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Pharmaceutical Arts and Applied Dental Hygiene and Waste Management Sciences.” You should also beware of colleges with lengthy applications that ask suspicious questions like where your child went to high school, and what his or her grades were. You’re looking for a college with a one-page application devoted almost entirely to explaining how you can pay by major credit card.

  2. Mascot. The good college mascot names were taken long ago by old established schools, which tend to have higher tuitions. To find a school in your price range, look for a mascot along the lines of “The Fighting Sphincters.”

  3. Parking. Parking is the single biggest crisis facing American higher education today. Despite the fact that colleges are, theoretically, institutions of higher learning, it apparently has never occurred to the geniuses who run them that anybody would be arriving by car. The result is that most colleges have approximately one parking space per 150 students, which means that many students spend their entire college careers cruising around looking for a legal spot. Many students are forced to park illegally and receive parking tickets, which at your top Ivy League schools can cost $5,000 per violat
ion. So when you and your child interview at a prospective college, be sure to ask the interviewer probing questions such as: “How many parking spaces does this college have?” “Where do you park?” “Can my child park in your space when you’re not conducting interviews?”

  4. Social life. College is not just about parking. College is also a place where young people make the transition from immaturity to adulthood via a process of forming long-term social bonds with other young people and then, later in the evening, getting drunk and possibly dropping large objects such as pianos off the roofs of tall buildings. This process occurs most readily at colleges with an active fraternity and sorority system. To determine whether a specific college has an active Greek system, visit the campus on a Saturday night and look for badly maintained buildings with large Greek letters painted on them and young men urinating out the windows.

  5. Access to cheap Mexican food. All colleges within the continental United States must be located within 50 yards of a cheap Mexican restaurant containing active bacteria colonies dating back to the Reagan Administration. This is federal law. Also, all trees and lampposts within a radius of one mile of the campus must be covered with faded flyers advertising performances six months ago by bands with names like Thunder Meat.

  6. Courses. Many colleges also offer courses, wherein students sit in a classroom once or twice a week and exchange e-mails while a graduate assistant drones away about some topic. You want your child to take courses that can lead to getting an actual job after graduation. This means you need to steer your child away from “liberal arts” and “humanities” courses involving nonbusiness topics such as humanity. If your child expresses an interest in, say, Shakespeare, or Aristotle, you must sit your child down and explain that, in the modern corporate environment, nobody cares about these guys, because they have both been dead for like 150 years. What you need in the modern corporate environment is up-to-date business information, such as the phone number for Technical Support. So your child should take only those courses that teach practical business knowledge, courses with titles like Business Administration, Marketing, Accounting, Business Communications, Marketing to Accountants, Administering a Communications Business, Communicating with Marketing Administrators, Cubicle Hygiene, Adjusting the Crappy Office Chair They Give You, and How to Steal a Co-worker’s Stapler After Somebody Steals Yours.

  Armed with this practical information, your child will be ready to go out and get a paying job in the modern corporate environment, as opposed to moving back in with you. Just to be sure, it’s a good idea, as a motivational tool, to move to another state just before graduation without telling your child your new address. Don’t worry about your child: This is a great country with a great economy, and there are tons of money-making opportunities out there. Such as selling kidneys to Dartmouth parents.

  11

  STARTING YOUR OWN BUSINESS

  Harness the Awesome Power of Human Stupidity

  CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: John D. Rockefeller. Thomas Edison. Henry Ford. Irving Chevrolet. General Electric. What do they have in common?

  Correct: They are all dead. But before they died, they got really rich. And do you know why? They started their own businesses.

  Why can’t you do the same thing? Why shouldn’t you benefit from your talents?

  One reason, of course, is that you don’t really have any talent. But that shouldn’t stop you any more than it stopped Paris Hilton. All you need is one idea, and you could make it big! And the beautiful thing is, it doesn’t even have to be a good idea. People have gotten rich from business concepts that seemed, at first glance, insanely stupid.

  Consider bottled water. Back in the 1950s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was growing up, there was no such thing as bottled water. We drank the water that came out of the faucet, or from water fountains, which were everywhere. We viewed water as an abundant commodity that was widely available in the form of streams, rivers, lakes, glaciers, and rainfall, which came directly out of the sky at no charge. In fact, all of this water was free, and it seemed to get the job done, in the sense of being wet. Back then, if you had said, “I’m going to put water into little plastic bottles and try to sell these bottles at a price higher, per fluid ounce, than the price of beer,” people would have laughed at you and blown cigarette smoke in your face, because back then everybody smoked, including household pets.

  But today, bottled water is a billion-dollar industry. We are awash in it. In the future, archeologists digging on the North American continent will discover the remains of our civilization under a 1,000-foot-thick layer of discarded Dasani bottles.

  Millions and millions of people simply refuse to drink any water that does not come from a plastic bottle. The bottled-water industry, through shrewd marketing, has convinced all these people that bottled water is healthier and cleaner than regular water. But is this true? Take a look at this bottle of water:

  Photography Credits

  To your naked eye, the water looks pure and clean and wholesome, right? But when we take a sample drop from this very bottle and magnify it 10,000 times under a laboratory microscope, we discover that it contains many impurities:

  Impurities Found in a Single Drop of Bottled Water

  SOURCE: Consumer Reports

  Photography Credits

  Does this mean that you should not drink bottled water? Of course not! It simply means that bottled water contains many hideous things that can kill you.

  But that is not the point. The point is that an idea that seemed totally crazy when it was first proposed ended up making a lot of money.

  Another good example is “reality” television. Years ago, nobody would have believed that millions of Americans would tune in, week after week, to watch attention-seeking dimwits degrade themselves on shows with names like Who Wants to Marry Their First Cousin? But guess what. The producers of these shows are getting rich. And that is why we must track them down and kill them.

  No, that would be wrong, and possibly illegal. The truth is that “reality” shows, like bottled water, teach us an important business lesson, a lesson that is both inspirational and heartwarming: People are unbelievably stupid. You can get them to buy anything, if you market it right.

  So you need to come up with an idea for a business. You want to start by deciding on a target demographic of people who (a) have money, and (b) would be willing to give you some. A prime target, in the sense of having more money than it can spend intelligently, is:

  Baby Boomers

  There are millions of us Boomers, and we have money, and we are needy, needy, needy. We need everything. For example, we were the first generation that needed to take ten weeks of night classes to learn how to have babies, which humans had previously been doing for thousands of generations with no formal training whatsoever.

  And now that we Boomers are getting old, we need more services than ever. For example, I need somebody to tell me where my reading glasses are. Like many Boomers, I own somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred pairs of cheap reading glasses, and at any given moment I cannot find any of them. You could start a business for people like me called: Where the Hell Are My Reading Glasses? You would charge us, say, $9.95 a month, and whenever we lost our glasses, we would call you up, and you would tell us where they are. And if you’re wondering how you would know where our glasses were, the answer is that you wouldn’t have to know, because we would also forget where we put your phone number. While we were looking around for it, we’d step on something sharp, and that would be our reading glasses.

  Another potentially big moneymaker would be to start a medical clinic for aging Boomer guys. Most of us older guys know we should see our doctors more often, but we are reluctant to do so because the doctor always wants to check our prostate gland, which is an organ located inside guys somewhere around the tonsils, to judge from how far the doctor reaches in there to get to it using a technique that I will not describe in detail here, other than to say that
it makes you never want to shake hands with a doctor again.

  So I see a huge profit potential in a chain of medical centers for aging Boomer guys called Touchless Health Care. These would be based on the concept of the “brushless” car wash, where no brush comes into physical contact with the car. The examination rooms at Touchless Health Care would be large, maybe 75 yards across. You, the aging guy patient, would stand on one side of the room; the physician would stand on the other side and conduct the examination via binoculars.

  “LOOKS GOOD FROM HERE,” the physician would shout.

  Note: Guys who felt that this procedure was too invasive would have the option of undergoing this examination without binoculars.

  Another service business you could start is Technical Support for Boomers. We Boomers are having a lot of trouble with technology these days, particularly if the technology is “digital.” Oh, we know that digital is good. Everybody tells us this. We know that sooner or later every electrical thing we own, including our toaster, will be digital. We just don’t get how digital works.

  This is particularly true of digital music. We Boomers come from a predigital era when all music came in a format known, technically, as the “round” format. First you had your records—your 78s, your 45s, your 33s—and then later you had your CDs. But they all worked the same way: You had a round thing that had music on it, and you put this thing onto or into some kind of player that spun it around, and this caused the music to come out of the speakers (also round).