Kids Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Distance Learning Doesn’t Work

May 14, 2020 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

Well, distance learning may work for some families, but from everyone I’ve talked to distance learning simply doesn’t work. Our family is no exception.

Editor’s Note: This article has a little less personal finance than usual in it. However, it is still present and it plays a fundamental role in my stress during this time.

If you are a new reader, here are my family’s basic dynamics:

Kids – Two boys, ages six and seven, in kindergarten and first grade
Mother – Virtually-deployed (at home) military pharmacist working 7 days, 12 hours a day weeks
Dad – Me. Blogger. Silicon Valley tech support manager (part-time)
Dog – Extra barky when not walked 2-3 times a day

Distance Learning Doesn't Work — Distance Learning is the exact opposite of this picture.

I know there are difficult situations around the ~~country~~ world. There are single parents. There are parents who have financial problems. (We’re okay in that department.) There are parents who are essential workers and have to put themselves in dangerous situations. (We were lucky that my wife can coordinate the COVID-19 response from home.) There are parents of kids with special needs. (We have one kid with borderline special needs. I hope we can find out more when doctors’ offices open again.)

It would be tone-deaf to compare us to any of the multitude of families who have any of these problems. On the other hand, it’s natural to compare your situation to other families’ situations. I’ve been doing that with some of the other parents in kids’ school and our family dynamic makes is one of the most difficult ones, I think. In the end though, it isn’t about such comparisons, it’s about how the situation works for you and your family. In a lot of ways, this article is a kvetching to get a lot of feelings out of my system. (I’m not sure I used kvetching correctly there, but I’m sticking with it.)

Distance Learning Problem: Two Curriculums

If you have 2, 3, or even 4 children, teaching multiple curricula is an impossible situation for a parent. We wouldn’t ask our best teachers to teach two or more curricula at the same time. The school recommends that they have their own learning space, so I’m running back and forth making print outs, checking workbooks, gathering special supplies, getting websites to work on PCs that won’t work on tablets (and vice versa), etc.

Two kids doing two distance learning curricula at the same time never syncs up. It’s a bad situation if one kid’s curriculum says to take a break and the other kid is still working. Usually when one kid takes a break the other demands a break. They spend most of their time on breaks. It’s hell fighting that inertia to get them back to work.

Distance Learning Problem: Two Young Children

If this came around 2 years ago and I had kids in pre-school and pre-kindergarten, I would likely teach them 100% myself. I had to do this for a month at a time here and there. I know all the best educational streaming shows for preschoolers. (Many people don’t like screen-time, but we talk about the shows and have activities afterward reinforcing the concepts. We did a lot of hands-on stuff too.) In any case, it’s different with kids who haven’t reached kindergarten. There’s not an expectation of academic learning at those ages.

I had great success homeschooling our kids during the start of COVID-19. Their school was on vacation and we had nowhere to go. I had to come up with some way to keep them busy. We had chess, Duolingo, some worksheets, science shows like Mythbusters Jr., and online learning such as Adventure Academy. These activities synced up well.

My kids are just starting to get good with tablets. They don’t know how to type well on a PC and a mouse or trackpad is just weird to them. Printing from a tablet simply doesn’t work. Using technology in this way is completely foreign to them. They are getting good, but everything has to go perfectly or there’s a high likelihood of meltdown.

I don’t know that parents of teenagers have it any better. There’s a whole lot more problems that can come into play as they get older. Let’s just say that I’m not rushing my kids into social media.

Distance Learning Problem: Boredom

I think everyone is fighting boredom nowadays. My kids have always found school boring. They get academics naturally. That’s their thing. The 7-year old in particular. He could have finished whole grammar and math workbooks in the first week of school.

Distance learning for us is taking something that is naturally boring (school), making it review (they already know it), and then putting it on a video screen. I believe the key to learning is intellectual curiosity. We are so very, very far away from that.

Distance Learning Problem: “Simply Opt Out” and “Money”

Whenever parents say that distance learning isn’t working for them, people on social media rush with two “solutions”:

“Simply Opt Out of Distance Learning”
That’s the obvious solution, right? However, we have to do something. No one thinks that a day of video games is the answer, right? I can go back to my homeschooling plan that was working well, but the school is going to have a lot of questions. We already get warning emails from their French teacher if they forget to submit the form. They did the video, but didn’t know that they needed to submit the form.
Also, it costs $5,000 a month to send two children to our private school. We get a generous military discount (or our kids wouldn’t be there). Even with that discount, it is still a lot of money by almost any measure.
It’s hard to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year and then say, “Oh, we’ll just ignore it and flush that money down the toilet.” We paid this tremendous amount of money for a specific service and we are only getting a fraction of it. The school isn’t offering any money back. I understand that it is a tough situation for them, too. A huge percentage of that tuition goes to teacher salaries.
It seems like the best thing we can do is try to maximize the value of this resource we paid for. If we “opt out” of distance learning, we get zero value for our money and the teachers’ hard work.
“Tell the teachers it’s too much work”
Sometimes it seems like the kids are getting too much work. There are days we start at 7:30AM and finish around 5PM. However, that’s not necessarily due to the amount of work assigned. The kids can fight for multiple breaks and then it takes awhile to get back to work.
Other times, the kids knock out the same amount of work before noon. Their mood (and productivity) during the coronavirus is like the rest of us: all over the place. The teachers can’t know the kids’ moods the next day when they are making their lessons.
I’ve found it’s rarely about the “amount of work”, but the type of work. If it’s “busywork” for my kids, the “extra bored” mood kicks in and it’s a failure for distance learning.
If the “work” is playing a game of chess or watching an episode of Mythbusters Jr., they can continue learning all day and all night.

Distance Learning Problem: The Wrong Environment

I make some money dog sitting and I’ve learned that dogs behave differently when they aren’t in their regular home. I’ve seen it in my own dog. He knows in my house that he shouldn’t jump his front paws up on the counters to look for food. In the first two minutes of doing a meet and greet at another house, he’s up there sniffing around.

Humans experience this as well. We have different rules for when we are on vacation than we do at home. We behave differently in the office than we do at home. Personally, I get a lot more work done at the library than I do at home.

Kids behave differently when they are at school when compared to the home. It’s hard to turn the mental switch on a 7-year old and say, “We are going to use our school brains now.” They have a history of home activities. This is the place they watch TV or play games on their tablets. This is their parents, not their teachers.

I’m not naïve enough to think that they behave like perfect students at school. I simply feel that the school environment is more conducive to learning.

Distance Learning Problem: Distance Learning itself

The majority of our distance learning consists of kids watching videos of the teachers and doing worksheets. The teachers have mentioned many times that they don’t get feedback on whether the kids are grasping the lesson or not. They simply send videos into the ether. I do my best to take pictures to document the work being done – mistakes and all. For the kids, it simply isn’t the same as learning the lesson in real time with their peers.

Some of the websites can help because teachers get reports on what the students are getting right and wrong.

Distance Learning Problem: Fighting for that Silver Lining

I spent a very, very long time trying to come up with any kind of silver lining to distance learning. I needed to feel like there’s something of value here. The closest I came is that distance learning allows for students to learn at their own pace. If a student learns faster, they can move on to the next thing. If a student needs more help, some extra review may be necessary.

The curriculum doesn’t have to match the general class speed. It can be fluid for each individual. If some whiz kid can blast through a grade of Khan Academy in a month, maybe he/she can move onto the next grade. One of our kids seems to be that kind of whiz kid.

It took our school a ton of work just to take the curriculum and move it online. They did it very quickly. I’m sure they would say that I should be happy we have what we have. It’s better than a lot of schools.

Unfortunately, I keep going back to what I could teach if only I had the power to adapt the curriculum. If I’m going to spend my time teaching, I should have a say on the curriculum and pace. A famous football coach, Bill Parcells, once said, “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.” He was referring to the ability to draft his own players, but I think it works here.

For us, I think that distance learning can only work if teachers act like consultants proposing ideas and parents are the ones choosing what to implement. Of course, both parents and teachers have to work towards a common goal of preparing the children for the next grade.

Hopefully by fall, the kids will be back in school. (I’m not optimistic.) Failing that, I’d like to see some individualization take place. Maybe I can convince the school to have my kids do an “independent” study. However, once again, it’s hard to pay all this money simply to ignore the resource.

Final Thoughts: Why Distance Learning Doesn’t Work

Every family is different. Some families may have no problems with distance learning. However, I think almost everyone finds it extremely difficult. Our particular family and school situation makes for one of those difficult situations.

I honestly don’t know what to do about the fall. It doesn’t look like schools are going to open up. The CA State University System has announced it will be online. Dr. Anthony Fauci said that having a vaccine or treatments that would allow for schools to open up is “a bridge too far.”

We have to prepare for the most likely scenario that schools won’t open up in the fall. Do we voluntarily throw tens of thousands of dollars at something that we know doesn’t work? If we decide not to, we’ll lose the ability to send our kids to the best school for years. We’ve valued this school tremendously (when the campus was open).

There are no easy answers here. I don’t even see a clear way to make the best of a bad situation.

This is the biggest stress in my life… and it looks like I’m going to be stuck with it for at least the rest of the 2020.

How I Homeschooled Our First Graders During the COVID-19 “Vacation”

April 7, 2020 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

First Grade Homeschooling — This is the spreadsheet of ideas that we used. Create your own and share it with me in the comments please!

I took a little creative liberty with the title. The “COVID-19 ‘Vacation'” refers to the two weeks my kids were on their normal “vacation” from school, but we were physically distancing at home. For them, this was their regularly-planned vacation. When the school was scheduled to start back up again, they had a distance learning curriculum. There’s nothing about COVID-19 that should be considered a vacation.

Additionally, we have a kindergartner and a first grader. That’s too long for the title, so I simplified it. For practical purposes, I would consider most of the activities below appropriate for students ranging from K-2.

As a financial blogger, I need to bring money into the mix. Many of these options were cheap or even free. Some were part of things that we paid for anyway (before COVID-19), such as Netflix and Hulu.

Finally, I’m taking most of the credit of this, so I often write in the first person. My wife’s US Public Health Service work has been very, very, busy as you might imagine. It’s actually been extremely busy for a few years, so I’ve taken it upon myself to be an amateur educator at night as a hobby. A passion for learning and access to the internet can take you very far nowadays. (My wife, as a pharmacist, did find some time to run an amazing class on the three states of matter: gases, liquids, and solids. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any litmus paper handy for a second class.)

That’s more than enough qualification, let’s get started!

Kindergarten to Second Grade Homeschooling

With our travel plans cancelled, we found it better to focus more on an academic vacation than we normally would have. Otherwise the kids would have just been watching TV and playing video games. That’s like just eating chocolate for 2 weeks straight. It’s not healthy.

It turns out that I was well-prepared for homeschooling. There are many parents who do this full time, so they are much better than I am. However, I’m a bit of a tiger dad and I buy a lot of educational thing like place-value charts and fraction cubes. (This is a good time to mention that if you buy some of the items listed, I may get a small commission.) I particularly like that place-value chart because as long as your net worth is under 10 million, you can display it and no one will know what it represents.

One of the most important goals was to disguise the learning parts as much as possible. The kids know they are on vacation. COVID-19 robbed them of their fun time, they shouldn’t feel penalized with tedious school work. As part of that, we mostly alternated between a learning activity and their own free choice, which was often a Pokemon show, but other times it was something to get their body moving, when possible.

There were times when I needed a break. For those times, I put together a list of a few educational shows that are also entertaining for them. I’m not against screen-time as long as it’s educational screen-time. Some of our favorite shows included: Oddsquad (PBS), Ruff Ruffman (PBS available on Amazon Prime), Brainchild (Netflix), Mythbusters Jr. (Hulu), and Warren Buffett’s Secret Millionaire’s Club (stream for free).

I had previously gotten a first and second grade workbook (over 300 pages each) from Aldi. They cover all kinds of topics – obviously reading and math, but also things like fact vs. opinion. I find that these tend to be a little easier than their school’s curriculum, so my kindergartner did some of the first grade worksheets with a little guidance (such as reading the instructions). My first grader works well with the second grade book. This is an example of what the books look like. I tricked my kindergartner into doing some of the easiest second grade sheets, because I thought he could handle the math (his strong suit). These books were about $4-5 each and in retrospect some of the best money I’ve spent.

The key to make this not feel like work is that they got earned a tally (or a sticker system) for each sheet. When they’ve collected 10 tallys (or stickers), they got a reward. One reward was Minecraft for their Amazon Fire HD 10s. Another reward was a box of Pokemon cards. I give them a budget and let them decide to combine their money for a bigger gift to share or buy separately.

I also introduced the kids to Prodigy Math. It’s a knock-off of Pokemon with pets that you can collect, power-up, and battle with. However, you “battle” by answering math facts correctly. It’s free, but there’s a heavy push to pay so that your pets can evolve. This is actually part of the kids’ school’s third grade curriculum (but that would be with more difficult math).

The kids’ school teaches French, even at this young age. My school didn’t have foreign language until I was in the 7th grade! I got their Fire HD 10 (my Fire 10 HD review) set up with Duolingo. I wanted them to continue with French, but they prefer Japanese. Either they want to learn what I’m learning or they really want to work for Gamefreak and invent new Pokemon one day. I’m fine if they prefer Japanese. There’s not much to make this interesting for them other than to continue the daily streak. I have been thinking about giving them money for earning Experience Points (XP) once a month. I’m worried about setting a dangerous precedent of paying for academic activity though.

The kids had a daily chess match. My kindergartner is better at math and spatial thinking, so he can compete well with my first grader, despite the 15 month age difference. I gave them some simple strategies and scoring (adding up the value of chess pieces). I followed the games and suggest moves they could have done differently and why. Eventually, I got them each a chess app for their tablets so they could play even if the other didn’t want to.

It may sound silly to mention, but we also simply read books. We had already read most of the books in our house multiple times (and we have so, so many books). So I got the Libby app, which has a lot of eBooks.

We worked on solving a 2×2 Rubik’s Cube as well. I found a deal on one awhile back and it hadn’t been used much (except by me). There are great instructions online on how to solve it. If you have a kid who loves puzzles, this is a good activity. It also teaches them how to follow directions. The kids also love to build Mega Construx Pokemon. (Yes, you’ll notice the Pokemon theme again and again.) It’s also great for following instructions – just like building model cars when I was a kid. We’ve got quite the collection of Mega Construx Pokemon now – gotta build them all!

We are also learning a lot of home skills such as cooking and laundry. I find that cooking has a lot of learning opportunities. Lots of measuring, fractions, and science all rolled into a practical life skill. I wanted them to learn how to do laundry, because they can help lighten the load and share my misery ;).

For physical education, the school had suggested Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube. Yes, there’s a Pokemon-themed Yoga there too. We take our dog on daily walks down some hiking local paths which is great for fresh air, social distancing, and sunshine. In certain places, I let the kids use their phones to play Pokemon Go (my phone is a mobile hotspot – they have old hand-me-down phones that just connect to mine via wifi). There’s a lot of math and game logic involved in Pokemon Go and they are excited about it. We tried to get bike riding and scootering in, but the weather didn’t cooperate as much as we’d like.

Kindergarten Homeschooling Tips

There were some activities (not a lot as you’ll see) that worked better for my kindergartner.

We slowly went through the start of Rebecca Sitton’s 1200 word list of high frequency words. My youngest could do about about 85% of the first 120. I circled the ones he needed help with and did a review with them a few days later. We stopped there. I didn’t want to go too far with this list – it may have gotten difficult and frustrating. I think most of these words are part of the first grade curriculum anyway, so he should be ready for a good start next year.

Khan Academy Kids has a free app that reads the books with the words being highlighted. This was useful, because it helped him see the words as they were being read. Unfortunately, the rest of the app was geared towards younger kids. My first grader can read very well, so this app wasn’t useful for him.

First Grade Homeschooling Tips

Just like the kindergarten homeschooling tips above, some of the things worked better for my first grader. This is where it pays to know your kids’ strengths and weaknesses, it will help you guide them to things that are challenging, but not frustrating.

In fact, there was really only thing that fit my first grader better than my kindergartner. Adventure Academy was available for free from some deal sites at the start of the school closures. It seems that access was taken away and maybe the code was for another school system and not meant for the general public. It’s geared for grades 3-8, but my first grader could get started and do most of the academic activities he came across. He learned about similes vs. metaphors for example. He would play with it for about 90 minutes a couple of times and then put it away for days and say it was “boring learning.”

I had high hopes that if the gamification aspect worked, he’d be able to learn at his own pace, which is far faster than I can keep up with. Normally, this costs anywhere from around $60 to $90 a year. I was afraid to invest in it because technically their Fire HD 10s are not supported and they don’t have laptops. However, the Fire HD 10s worked decently through the Google Play store that was side-loaded on them. Very rarely, it was a little slow. Amazon’s Fire HD 10s now have an upgraded processor, so if you have the latest one it will probably work fine.

Final First Grade Homeschooling Tips

There are so many lists of resources out there, especially now. It’s OVERLOAD! It simply isn’t reasonable for any parent or child to explore them all. That’s why I’m writing a curated version of what worked for us.

It was also especially helpful to keep a spreadsheet (or even a simple list) of things that worked. For example, I had forgotten about Secret Millionaire’s Club until I reviewed the spreadsheet to write this article. That’s my Google Sheet at the top of this article. What I like about having a spreadsheet is that I can sort for different types of activities like art or give myself a break by sorting for television. It took me only a few minutes to create this spreadsheet. It could easily be dozens and dozens of items if I needed more. However, a few staples that we could do everyday (chess and worksheets) and some variety went a long way.

If you are looking for more inspiration there are numerous suggestions in this Slickdeals post, this OneTab page, and Wide Open School. I’d recommend the last one, Wide Open School, as it’s powered by the trusted brand of Common Sense Media and a bunch of other brands you might have heard of like Sesame Street, PBS, Nick Jr., National Geographic, Scholastic, etc. It would be my “Lazy” recommendation.

Unfortunately educating children is another case in life where there’s no “one size fits all.” Hopefully this article gave you some ideas on how to combine learning and fun. I hope even more that we can get back to school and work making this purely supplemental. If your school is doing a good job with distance learning now and you don’t need any new ideas, maybe save it for the summer.

These Millionaires Made Their 7-Year-Old Buy His Own School Lunch

March 6, 2020 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

This is the first edition of Kid’s Corner. I hope to do use one or two Fridays a month to write about issues of money and kids.

That’s probably the worst headline I’ve ever written. It’s terrible. What ARE these @#$*!$% thinking!

We’re the villains in our own story. Yep, we’re pure, pure evil.

Let me tell the tale of how we arrived at such a dastardly act.

Every day we pack a lunch for our kids school. You could say it’s the typical brown bag lunch, but we of course use reusable bags nowadays. Our kids are picky eaters (aren’t they all?), so it’s taken awhile to find some foods that they’ll eat. Figuring out what they are going to eat each day takes more hours than I care to admit.

We often sacrafice nutrition for our sanity. One such compromise we make is buying Lunchables. We’re not proud, but we are able to supplement them with some healthy foods. At the local military commissary they are around $1.25. That’s a great price compared to what they cost at the grocery store. With the other healthy snacks that they eat at lunch, our total lunch cost is probably around $2 a day. We spend probably another $1 or $1.50 on snacks for before and after lunch at school.

The other day our 7-year-old says that he wants the pizza hot lunch at school. He doesn’t want the spaghetti and meatballs lunch though, because that has tomato sauce on it. I’m sure that every parent is familiar with this kind of logic.

Kid Context: I interviewed my 7-year-old about the differences of tomato sauces of pizza and pasta. It seems that pizza cheese covers up the sauce taste, making it clearly edible where pasta with sauce is not.

The Pizza Connundrum

If it was as simple as pizza always being safe this story wouldn’t be less interesting. Pizza is a safe food only about 75% of the time. Those are actually very good odds in comparison to other foods.

The hot lunch at school has to be bought by the semester and paid in advance. There are no refunds and no exchanges. That’s the deal the school had to make with the outside vendor to reduce complexity. Essentially we have to make the decision to pay $60 for 10 pizza days to finish out the school year… or skip the pizza all together.

The math is easy – it’s $6 a day for hot pizza lunch. That seems like a lot to me, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to outsource catering because the school doesn’t have a functional cafeteria. Obviously, I’d rather continue to pay the $2 a day, but spending $4 more once a week isn’t going to make a dent in our budget.

However, what if this pizza falls in the 25% of bad pizza? Then we threw all $60 down the drain. My 7-year-old doesn’t care if we lose $60. It’s not his money…

… but what if it was?

That’s what I asked myself. What if he had to put some of his own money on the line? Would he be so quick to throw it in the trash? Would it taste better because he earned it?

Now, of course we wouldn’t make him pay for all $60. We wouldn’t even make him pay the difference. However, one dollar a day could work. He’s good at math for his age, so we could lay out what we currently spend and what the hot lunch costs.

The final aspect to this is that we haven’t set up an allowance policy yet. I’ve got a lot of unorganized ideas. I don’t want it to be, here’s money for free every week. I want to set up a base of chores for the money. I want to set up some extra chores he can do to earn more money. I want to have charts to track the chores so that at the end of the week he can cash in.

I also want someone who is awesome at graphics to create the chart for me. I’m joking, of course. There are a lot of chore charts on Pinterest, but so many of them are not quite right and customizing them to remove a chore or add a chore is not easy (for me at least).

There are a lot of money lessons to be learned here and this seems like a good time to start laying down that foundation.

Could You Save ~$100,000 by Age 18? She did!

November 11, 2019 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

I often read a lot of financial articles and think, “I should write about this.” About 10% of the time, I actually do. The rest of the time… well that’s how I earn my nickname.

One of those stories that I always meant to write about was the story of this 18-year old young woman who had saved $85,000.

It’s the perfect personal finance headline and story. Everyone wants an easy recipe to wealth and it’s tempting to think, “~~I’ll have what she’s having.~~ I’ll do what she’s doing. If she can save so much by age 18 with a full school schedule and part-time jobs, maybe I can do it too.”

I don’t know what is possible for you or not. I can only walk in my own shoes… others’ don’t fit me well.

As I went through the story, I realized that (reading between the lines) her financial life got complex quickly. I think it would make for a better case study in a book rather than a one-page web story with a few quotes. I’m sure I won’t be able to do it justice here, especially because I have to make some, possibly erroneous, assumptions.

Before I get started, I want to stress that the drive that she has and personal responsibility* are unmatched. If I get a little critical, it’s because personal finance has entered a time where we must to point out privilege – especially in any kind of success story.

What we know is that she grew up in Marin County, CA. You may not know Marin very well, but having lived in NorCal for 6 years, Marin County is a very wealthy area. It’s possibly one of the most wealthy areas in the country.

Why does that matter? This young woman started as a dog and cat sitter, moved to baby sitting, and finally as a waitress. As a dog sitter, I can tell you that areas that have higher costs of living pay more. Rich people love their pets. The same translates to babies. I’d imagine that tips are better in wealthy places too.

Here’s another thing about dog sitting, you need to have a house. Many apartments don’t take animals, and most of those that do probably require the pet to live there full-time. Because we have a home with a nice fence and I work from home, my kids can get started on a Roth IRA at an absurdly young age. That’s going to part of their privilege story. However, they’ll have to do the work too.

There are a couple confusing parts about the original SF Gate article.

It mentions that, at 18, she lives with a friend and independent pays for food, phone, car, clothing. Presumably this is a new arrangement for an 18 year old, so it probably isn’t too significant… and thus not worth the mention in the article.

Next, the article says that the parents made a number of money mistakes which the young woman learned from. Yet, she claims to have gotten “really intrigued by money” when the parents bought a new house, the year she started her pet-sitting gig. We don’t get details on what mistakes the parents made, but it seems obvious to see that the house made the income opportunity a possibility.

The obvious elephants in the room is that many kids in Marin County-type areas don’t have expenses. They aren’t expected to help with family bills. Thus almost every dollar earned is a dollar that can be invested. While on the topic of investing, the market had been up the previous 8 years (as of publication in 2017), so it’s possible she was able to double her earnings in the market. It was mentioned that she has multiple investing accounts and had bought Apple stock. Kudos to her!

Another important thing to consider is that she only sleeps 5 to 6 hours a night. She’s obviously very successful with that amount of sleep. That’s obviously a rare trait to have. The importance of getting more sleep is one of the few things that nearly all health experts can agree on. Getting by on less sleep could be great for your financial bottom line, but it might not lead to a high quality of life.

Final Thoughts

This is essentially the blue print that I would want for my own kids. I just hope that in the rush to make money she hasn’t missed out on being a kid. That’s my concern for my own kids as I fight my natural instinct to push them to do more and more.

Focusing on the privilege aspects in this article has been difficult for me. I’d much rather say, “Let’s celebrate this awesomeness!” And it is nothing less than awesome.

You may have noticed that I didn’t use the young woman’s name. I was curious to see if there was a follow-up to the articles that came out a couple of years ago. I found that her social media accounts were private. This is my way of granting some of that privacy, while still talking about her financial accomplishments.

* Personal responsibility seems to be a big political buzzword nowadays. I don’t mean it in a political sense. I simply mean that she seems responsible, which, of course comes with the dog sitting and baby sitting gigs.

McEconomics!

May 28, 2019 by Kosmo 3 Comments

This article is from occasional contributor, Kosmo. At the end, I’ll tack on some of my own McDonalds economics thoughts.

Several weeks ago, I was at McDonalds with my 9 year old. It blew his mind that I was able to put together a package that included more food at a lower price than the standard option. I’ve turned this into a personal finance lesson for him and his 11 year old sister.

They like McNuggets. A lot. Typically, they’ve had the six piece Happy Meal, but they’ve reached the point where they (usually) don’t care about the toy anymore, and they want more food.

What do they want? Between the two of them, they want 18-20 nuggets, some fries, and two bottles of chocolate milk.

The standard six piece happy meal contains:

6 nuggets
Small fries
Apple slices or Go-gurt
Drink (chocolate milk)

The cost is $4.18 each, for a total cost of $8.36 for two. They end up with fewer nuggets than they want, but two Go-gurts (which they’re somewhat ambivalent about). Realistically, they’d need three Happy Meals to get the right number of nuggets.

So I went comparison shopping to see how else I might accomplish the goal.

A ten piece nugget value meal is $7.49. To get twenty nuggets, I’d have to spend $14.98! I’d end up with

Twenty nuggets
Two medium fries
Two medium fountain drinks

I’d have to swap out the fountain drinks for the chocolate milk. I’m not sure if there’s an upcharge for that, because this option was immediately discarded – because I found a better deal.

I went the a la carte option and took advantage of some special deals and coupons.

The ten piece nugget is part of a 2 for $5 deal.
I have a coupon for a large order of fries for $1. This is a coupon I can use once per week via the McDonalds app.

Here’s what I ended up ordering:

Two ten piece nuggets @ 2/$5 = $5
One large order of of fries = $1
Two chocolate milk @ $1 = $2

Total cost: $8. This is 8 more nuggets than the two Happy Meals, and more fries, since a large is more than twice as big as the small. The cost is 36 cents less than the two Happy Meals! You may have noticed the missing Go-gurt. The good news is that you can buy a Go-Gurt or apple slices for 50 cents. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I get two Go-Gurts. That brings the total to $9. I’ve gotten all the food the Happy Meals would have, plus eight extra nuggets, for 64 cents more than the cost of the Happy Meals.

For myself, I got two bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits. Sticker price $3.39 or 2 for $4. I would have slightly preferred one bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and one egg McMuffin, but I’m not going to pass up the 2 for $4 deal.

Later, I pulled out a piece of paper and walked them through the options and prices. They were impressed at the price differences.

Is this post simply a way for me to brag about my ability to save money at McDonalds. Well, sort of. But mostly it’s to illustrate how simple it is to teach some basic personal finance lessons.

Unit pricing is another area where I try to teach the kids an occasional lesson. Toilet paper is a good place to start, because there are so many options within a brand and style. Which Charmin Ultra Soft Mega Roll is the best option – the 4 pack, the 8 pack, the 12 pack, or the 18 pack? You’d expect the per unit price to drop as the quantity increases, but that’s not always the case in the real world.

My nine year old is starting to grasp the concept. He can already determine which box of garbage bags we should buy.

I’m not necessarily a tightwad. There are things I’ll spend money one (MLB.TV, for example). But if I need 36 rolls of toilet paper, I don’t want to pay more per roll simply because I chose the wrong size package. 36 rolls is 36 rolls, regardless of how they are packaged.

I’ve also given the kids a thirty thousand foot exposure to concepts like bank accounts, credit accounts, pensions (and the difference between defined contribution and defined benefit), 401(k)s, 529s, and income taxes. As they get older, I’ll go deeper into these topics, so that by the time the graduate from high school, they’ll have a solid understanding of personal finances.

Editor’s McDonalds Economics Thoughts

For a long time, we were able to escape the McDonalds Happy Meal trap. Our kids simply didn’t know they existed until Grandma spoiled the plan. They would have figured it out eventually, but I can still fondly look back on those days.

With my kids at age 5 and 6, the Happy Meal is still important to them. However, we use it a treat. Typically, we’d take advantage of the five dollar 20-piece nuggets in our area. That’s the equivalent deal as Kosmo’s (except for the bulk requirement). Since my kids are smaller, we don’t need too much more to feed 3 or 4 of us. A $1 Value Menu sandwich will usually do it.

Recently, we’ve revisited the value of the Big Breakfast with Hot Cakes which is an economical ~1350 calories. Everyone has their favorites and it just seems to work out for us. Once again, an extra $1 value menu sandwich or two can round out a hearty breakfast for the family. It’s been particularly handy at the Orlando airport terminal that we seem to visit a few times a year.

As for teaching unit pricing, my kids are a little young for that. I’m very good with unit pricing, but toilet paper is very, very difficult. The best I can do is look at square footage to avoid the differences in mega-rolls and regular rolls. Doing a dollar per square foot isn’t always easy though.

Instead, I’m going to turn to teaching unit pricing through something that I know my kids will pay attention to: Pokemon. Specifically Pokemon Go has items for sale at the shop. A single super egg incubator will run 200 PokeCoins. However, you can get 10 super egg incubators and a bunch of other useful stuff (lucky eggs, and star pieces) for 1480 PokeCoins in an Ultra Box.

We’ll go down this road in more detail over the next year or so. For now, I explain that I can get a lot more things if I save my PokeCoins and take advantage of the package deal. I have a suspicion that unit pricing will come up in more video games in the future.