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Ok, so I’m going to consider this a corollary to yesterday’s consciousness post. The relationship kids have to money has always fascinated me. Change seems paramount–it’s shiny and can seem very much like loot. It makes chiming sounds and shrines called piggy banks are constructed to house it. I do blatantly wish that I still had the awe and respect for money that I rocked throughout my childhood. And I also wish that I could hit up those initial revenue streams that were only available to me then. I had a young, bronco’s heart, and it could be bought without shame! Here are some of the ways I earned money:
- Picking up nails and screws at work sites (abandoned ones, or at least on weekends) or recently finished houses; it peeved my father to walk past or otherwise spy any of this detritus, and he payed me a nickel for each I could find. If I were feeling broke or bored, I’d head off to find some nails. My first experience with anything like residuals.
- Selling “artwork”; this ill-advised venture was an attempt to make me more comfortable with the door-to-door life, surely, since it involved some of my fellow Girl Scouts; we’d get together, frantically draw Snoopy in different contexts, then try to sell them to our parents, friends, and neighbors.
- Convincing other people’s moms to hire us for some kind of contract cleaning gig
But that’s just me…Were any of you scavenging for nails or otherwise incorporated?
My brother and I used to save our change and/or allowance religiously. So much so, that we saved up $100! A good amount for a 6 and 8 year old in the early 90’s.
Unfortunately, our parents found our stash, and eventually nickel and dimed what little savings we had until we had nothing left. A pretty sad experience for someone that young. Do you think that might be the cause for my currently horrible money management techniques? Haha.
posted by kevin on 12-11-2007 at 1:44 pm
we did boring old lemonaide stand when I was young - and that morphed into “taste tests” between kool-aide and flavor-aide when the Pepsi challenge was popular. When I was in my early teens, I’d set up at the end of my driveway with a hose and a bucket of suds and wash cars
when I was really young (4 or 5), we put on a neighborhood play, and I think charged we admission.
:)
posted by Clotho on 12-11-2007 at 1:49 pm
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I can remember hoarding those little 25-cent bouncy balls from supermarket gumball machines and then trying to resell them to friends and family for double the price. When I realized they weren’t interested I remember putting all my “bouncies” (probably 200 or more by that time) in an old Easter basket and sitting at the end of our driveway with a hand-made sign, just waiting for that one right person to ride by and think to themselves “Hmmm, I suddenly and for no apparent reason have the urge to spend an ungodly amount of money on something totally useless!”
Needless to say, I still have a treasure trove of bouncies somewhere in my parents’ attic.
posted by BAS on 12-11-2007 at 1:49 pm
oddly, i was feeling nostalgic the other day for my first “job.” when i was a kid, our house had a giant crabapple tree in the front yard. circa august every year, there would be a loud thumping sound that indicated every single little crabapple had simultaneously hit the deck. my job was to pick up all the crabapples that were likely to get stuck in the lawn mower. i got 25 cents per bucket filled with the suckers. i learned pretty quick that it only took two buckets to buy an ice cream frog (with the M&M eyes) from the Good Humor man…
posted by terri on 12-11-2007 at 1:49 pm
My sister and I would fight to get to clean out my dad’s car. He was a salesman, and worked out of his car. The space behind the passanger seat was his garbage can, and it was full of wadded up paper, fast food containers, and who knows what else. But the best part of cleaning out his car was that whenever he got change, he’d drop all the pennies below the driver’s seat (he was a total slob, can you tell?). So whoever could put up with cleaning out his garbage also got to collect all the pennies.
We also got paid per dog turd we picked up in the back yard.
posted by jenny on 12-11-2007 at 1:53 pm
In Kindergarten I went without snacks to profit $1 a day. I ended up buying an NES with the money.
posted by Jeremiah on 12-11-2007 at 1:56 pm
My grandparents had a huge vegetable garden when I was growing up. Every summer my grandmother would pay my sisters and I a nickle for each tomato worm we’d pull off the plants. Then we’d make a trip to the local nickle and dime store to spend our “millions” on some little trinket or toy.
posted by Angela on 12-11-2007 at 2:00 pm
My great grandma took some medications that made her hands shake badly so she couldn’t wrap her formidable stash of Christmas gifts. She paid me to wrap them all (there were TONS!!) every year.
In elementary school I made little beaded rings and sold them for $1 a piece, until someone told on me for violating a school rule.
posted by Melissa on 12-11-2007 at 2:04 pm
it wasn’t the first, but it was the most successful: my best friend and i made home made bread and cookies and sold them around our neighborhood during the summer. since i live in the southwest where it’s common for it to be over 100 degrees, nobody wanted to be baking and we were pretty profitable. my mom helped us some of course and it was her double oven and ingredients we used. we managed to make $300 in a little over two weeks. not bad for junior high! all the neighbors were sad when we had reached our goal and weren’t baking anymore. we had a few fresh cookie addicts asking us when we were going back into business. :)
posted by lindsay m on 12-11-2007 at 2:04 pm
my daughter is selling the bobble heads from ball games…she sold one for 130.00…
posted by mark on 12-11-2007 at 2:07 pm
We didn’t have much money, but we always had a housekeeper. She’d come by for a few hours in the afternoon every day to clean the place. One year my mom thought it would be a good idea if I were the housekeeper for the summer and she’d pay me. I did it for about three weeks and absolutely hated it.
We were Mormons. One day while clearning the basement I found an unopened bottle of Crown Royal whiskey hidden between floor joists in the ceiling… I poured the whole thing down the kitchen sink. I was then given time off… with pay. The whiskey was never mentioned.
posted by Trevor on 12-11-2007 at 2:09 pm
My parents built their own house, and my dad (who’s an electrician) had a bunch of friends who happened to be masons, carpenters, etc. work on it. This was before the current crackdown on smoking, so by the time the house was finished there were ridiculous amounts of cigarette butts lying around everywhere. My dad paid me a penny for every one I picked up, which, in retrospect, was pretty gross. I was about 5, and this was before my parents had stopped smoking, so after a few hours I realized that I could supplement my income by taking all the butts out of the ashtrays in the house… which I suppose counts as fraud…
posted by gibson8tor on 12-11-2007 at 2:13 pm
My cousin and I cut lawns. We pushed our mower, clippers, rake and broom through the streets, rang doorbells and made money.
posted by fixedgear on 12-11-2007 at 2:16 pm
Oh this is a fun topic. :D
When my cousin and I were young-maybe like I was 10 and he was 11-we’d give his mom a huge grocery list so that we could run a “restaurant” in her kitchen. He cooked and I served-we’d charge our poor family for whatever they ate. We even had menus. OMG this is bringing back some great memories.
The funniest thing about it all? What money we earned was spent at–get this–a downtown Red Owl for Pizza Rolls.
Of course we could have just asked my aunt to buy us the Pizza Rolls to begin with, but where’s the lesson there?
Thanks for the lift, I needed it. ;)
posted by mrs.djs on 12-11-2007 at 2:17 pm
I lived on an Air Force Base near the golf course. Every morning I would go to the driving range and collect the “good” golf balls (not the range balls) and then go to the 17th hole and sell them to the golfers for 25 cents a piece. Couple that with selling lemonade and I cleared $500 bucks as a 12 year old one summer. Those were the days…
posted by VTHokie on 12-11-2007 at 2:19 pm
My friends and did a lemonade stand, but we also had a marketing scheme. We conned one of my older brother’s friends into wearing this bear costume we had in the attic (don’t ask me why we had one) and made him stand out on the corner and dance around to attract attention. I don’t think it helped us sell more lemonade, but we felt like a real business.
posted by Julia on 12-11-2007 at 2:22 pm
My parents love telling one story from my childhood about me and money. I don’t even remember the incident, so I couldn’t have been more than 3 or so years old at the time. My grandfather handed me a $100 bill. I was ecstatic! Then he said he was just kidding, and he took it back and handed me a $1 instead, which I proceeded to throw in the trash can before walking away angrily. I guess I knew the real value of a dollar, even then.
posted by Craig on 12-11-2007 at 2:23 pm
My dad used to give my sisters and me a penny for each cigarette butt we found in the backyard.
posted by Stephanie on 12-11-2007 at 2:25 pm
Now I am about to sound like an OLD MAN but this is just something I have observed;
Much the same as the fascination with shiny objects, kids today are crazy about plastic. Maybe it is the Barbie play sets with “real working” credit cards or just the shear fact that we spoil our children. I have found myself truely guilty of the latter. It just really hit home the other day when my “5 and 7yr old” girls wanted a new toy and told me,” just put it on your card.” Young people have no concept of what credit cards can do to them and their future. I work in banking and see signs of the fact everyday. I studied management of investments and accounting for years in college and even high school. However, I have never seen a school offer students a class on management of personal funds and credit.
Needless to say the girls got the toys they wanted. They just owe me a month’s worth of their allowances.
posted by brian l. atwell on 12-11-2007 at 2:34 pm
My dad paid my brother and I a nickel for nails too! It was awesome when they got a new roof put on, because we would find entire clips of nails on the ground (I don’t know if they’re called clips, but they were the strips of nails that were tied together for nail guns). I don’t think my dad knew what he was getting into with that one.
posted by Kate on 12-11-2007 at 2:38 pm
I lived in New York City and the only way I could make any money was to take a length of string, tie a rock to it, put some softened chewing gum on the rock and then try to fish change out from the subway gratings.
I don’t think I made very much money at it!
posted by Bo on 12-11-2007 at 2:41 pm
My brother and I got to keep the spare change that accumulated around the house, if we sorted it and put it into coin rolls. Guess this was before the days of CoinStar…
posted by CW on 12-11-2007 at 2:55 pm
In fourth grade I found my older brother’s adult magazines stash. Being a budding entrepreneur, I promptly took one of the magizines to school and sold it to a friend for 75 cents and part of his lunch (well below market value). I immediately got caught when the kid showed his prize off to everyone after school and revealed his supplier to the teacher. Shortly therafter, I was forced to begin working within the system by delivering newspapers.
posted by Michael on 12-11-2007 at 2:56 pm
My brother and I had several ventures in the early 60’s. In the spring we dug and sold worms to fisherman who walked past our house. We got a penny for the small ones and two cents for the biggies. In the summer we took our Radio Flyer around town collecting soda bottles. The twelve ounce ones were two cents and the quarts were a nickel. During the winter we went door to door shoveling snow. We got twenty-five cents for a sidewalk and fifty cents for a driveway. WE went out at 5:00 A.M., at 7:30 we went to Mike’s Restaurant to get a hot chocolate and listen for school closings. If there was no school, we went back pot for several hours.
posted by gus on 12-11-2007 at 2:57 pm
Moneymaker 1: I had a lemonade stand that got shutdown by the local police, apparently I didn’t have the necessary permit !!!
Moneymaker 2: We lived in a house where the basement would flood every spring. So my brother had the bright idea to give tours of our basement in which we kept an “alligator.” I took the money at the door and he gave the tours. He threw a few sticks in the water and luckily there was a drain that created some movement but ultimately he banked on the the horror movie trick of suspense, screaming and never actually seeing anything. We were pretty successful.
posted by Ananda on 12-11-2007 at 3:00 pm
My sister and I would dig up worms in our garden and put them in paper cups and sell them to the fishermen who came to fish in the state park by our house. It was hard to do anything else, as we lived on a farm down a road that no one but fishermen came down.
posted by Kristina on 12-11-2007 at 3:00 pm
OMG, Love this topic. My kids are always looking for money, aksing to keep my change, etc….
When I was a wee lass, I got a paper route. I must have been 12 or 13 at the time. This was in suburban NJ, so there were tons of houses. I,of course got the 2 mile long afternoon route. I never got home before dark….. collecting was a pain (I want my $2!!) and people were always dodging paying me. In the winter I had to pull all the papers on a sled. It was horrible and cold but I got to sneak smokes on the job and I saved enough to buy a spankin new ten speed from a ‘real’ bike shop, not just toys R us, and I scored a leather member’s only jacket. I was stylin’….. ah the memories.
I hope my kids don’t read this. I make them pickup dog turds for free- they think it’s fun. ha ha ha
posted by QT314159265 on 12-11-2007 at 3:20 pm
My mom was a teacher, and she used to pay me to grade papers for her- kindergarten and first grade math and spelling tests, $1 a batch.
And, one time when my dad was still smoking, my brother and I decided to put up No Smoking signs in our room and charge a fine- 25 cents for a cigarette and $1 for a cigar. (Dad never smoked cigars.) He ended up paying me 50 cents and my brother a dollar- he busted out the “It’s a boy” cigar. Much, much later I realized that that was the only time my dad had ever smoked in our rooms, so I guess that was pretty thoughtful of him to limit our exposure to second hand smoke, even 25 years ago.
posted by Lebetho on 12-11-2007 at 3:40 pm
My older sister used to pay me for all kinds of dirty work, like foot rubs (a buck an hour!). I also took money to execute various illicit contracts, including waiting for the mailman to intercept what must have been a pretty bad report card. And several times, I took cash from her to break into my other sister’s room so she could borrow clothes. I had to climb out of a bathroom window, onto the roof, in through the bedroom window, and then unlock the bolt on the door from the inside. Back in the 80s, I loved the video arcade and these odd jobs kept the quarters flowing.
posted by Bill G. on 12-11-2007 at 3:47 pm
I made arrangements to advertise for various businesses around town. I would turn in my school assignments and essays with certain words highlighted and underlined. When a teacher approached me to ask why I was doing this, I would launch into a schpeel about how they should buy some item related to the particular word (but not the assignment).
Just kidding. I made extra pocket money as a kid by doing yardwork for the elderly.
posted by Jason! on 12-11-2007 at 3:48 pm
I grew up on a farm, and we would “walk beans” which is walk down the bean rows with a hoe (lots of “ho” jokes) and take out any weeds that were growing. My brothers and I made $1200 one summer, we bought a sweet go-kart. We also raised chickens each summer. My dad would pay for the feed and the chickens, but we did all the work and the marketing, and got to keep all the money. It was his way of giving us money by making us work for it. I went to Europe in high school with my “Chicken money”
posted by Erik on 12-11-2007 at 3:49 pm
My best money-making adventure ever was when I was 13. The internet was pretty new, and Sailor Moon was a very popular anime. I went to my local Wal-Mart and picked up some Sailor Moon stickers for 50 cents, then resold them on the internet for $5-7 each.
It was awesome. I made so much money! :D
posted by Betty Ann on 12-11-2007 at 3:54 pm
Ever hear of potato bugs? haha We got paid by the bug- pick ‘em off and drop ‘em in a can of gasoline- I don’t remember how much we got, but not a lot. There were a lot of bugs though!
Here’s the neat thing- after my siblings and I were all out of high school (all 4 of us), my dad revealed his secret stash. He’d taken 4 big glass jars (gallon size??) and at the end of each day emptied his pockets of change and divided it among the 4 jars. He wasn’t demonstrative at all, so just picturing him carefully doing that each day was pretty sweet. I don’t remember the total, but it was substantial- and we all had the same amount.
posted by ann on 12-11-2007 at 3:58 pm
my brother and i opened a lemonade stand in our backyard the spring our mother put the yard on the “Homes and Gardens” tour. it was a warm spring and there weren’t many refreshments provided on the tour. we decided this was a golden opportunity. in order to get maximum effect, we got dressed in matching play outfits, got squeaky clean and beamed smiles to all the little old ladies coming though the tour (it didn’t hurt that my brother was missing a front tooth at the time, amped up the cutesy factor). we charged a nickel, but with our set-up more often than not we were given a dollar, patted on the head, and told to keep the change.
CHA-CHING!!
posted by mri on 12-11-2007 at 4:03 pm
I still have a fascination with shiny change. I have several empty diaper-wipe boxes (sturdy plastic with a snap lid) that I dump my pocket change in at the end of the day. At the end of the year, I roll it up and count it and the agreement I have with my wife is I can spend it on anything I want without fear of marital veto. That’s I how I purchased my laptop. Now I’m saving up for a digital SLR. With this method I can buy nice toys with no guilt of wrecking the budget.
posted by Michael on 12-11-2007 at 4:07 pm
i picked onion weeds in my grandparents’ front yard for $2 an hour. i earned $14.
i also think i just decided that for every time i made a hoop in the drive way i earned a penny. so i’d go spend an hour in the driveway shooting the basketball, then go load up on pennies from my dad’s jar.
posted by katie on 12-11-2007 at 4:13 pm
Not really a way to make money, but it was my first encounter in getting paid for doing something.
My parents would keep a 5-gallon plastic jug (the ones you use for buying water at the grocery store) and drop their change in it. When it got relatively full, have to roll coins. This was, obviously, the days before Coin Star. Everyone who helped would each guess how much money was in the jug. The person who got the closest got $50.
posted by Erin on 12-11-2007 at 4:30 pm
My parents farmed my brother and me out to some friends who took us to neighborhoods where we put flyers on their screen doors.I’m not sure what the flyers were for, remodeling maybe…once we started putting the flyers in the mailboxes, it all came to an end…don’t nobody touch the US mailboxes other than the US mailmen…I got massive blisters on the soles of my feet and hated every minute of it…
posted by donner on 12-11-2007 at 4:46 pm
They were building our development when my family moved in. We went from picking blueberries in the field behind our house to scrounging building materials from the half-finished houses in the space of a month. Sort of like going to sleep in “Dandelion Wine” and waking up in “Riddley Walker.”
posted by Joe Maz on 12-11-2007 at 5:14 pm
We lived near a park and on the far side of the park was a stream and on the far side of that was a golf course. Anyway, we’d pick up the golf balls from the park & fish them out of the stream and put them in 5 gallon buckets. My mom paid us $5.00 per bucket which I’m sure she sold back to the golf course - plus as an added bounus she got us out of the house in to the fresh air for hours on end.
posted by Shelly on 12-11-2007 at 6:40 pm
Sadly I think I just made a lemonade stand. We were pretty lazy about it so by the time we had made the lemonade and set everything up, the excitement was gone and we were ready to move on to the next game. Plus everyone who had any money was at work because we usually only got crazy money-making ideas during summer vacation. Besides that I just picked up the star fruit that fell from the tree in our front yard and did other chores like folding clothes and washing dishes. I think I’m too young for a nickel to have enticed me enough to dig up worms or look for nails. Sad.
posted by Leah on 12-11-2007 at 6:54 pm
I sold walnuts. We had a tree in the backyard and a busy gravel road in front of the house. I’d collect buckets full of walnuts from under the tree and haul them to the road to dump them so that the cars would run over them and break off the hard green hulls that cover the walnut. The next day, I’d collect them and after a day or so of drying, I’d sell them for about $5 per bucket.
posted by bibli0phile on 12-11-2007 at 9:30 pm
First job: formed a “company” when I was 7 with my four best friends to do yard work around the neighborhood. We were ridiculous about keeping everything equal to include taking turns pushing the mower across the lawn, counting how many swipes we took with the car wash sponge, etc. We made a grand total of $127 but, take away the $80 we had to pay for the cast that resulted from a fight…
Second money making plan: Selling my sister’s autograph and kisses. My sister was the school hottie and so I paid her 5 cents to sign a piece of paper and then I had another girlfriend of mine write a personalized note in girly writing above it and sell it for 1-5 dollars. I also kissed pieces of paper and sold them as kisses from my sister. I still have a couple that I send to her in the odd Christmas card or birthday card to her kids.
posted by Byron on 12-11-2007 at 11:31 pm
i never realized just how many schemes i hatched growing up unti now.
when my friend irene and i were 5 or so, mary kate and ashley were very popular. i was mary kate, she was ashley. we would sell tickets to our neighbors and grandparents and put on very unimpressive renditions of “brother 4 sale” and “i am the cute one”.
in third grade, my friend siobhan and i were convinced that we were psychics and we set up a stand in our apartment complex to perform readings. after only one customer, some really old boys (probably about fourteen, which was ancient to us) came up and thought we were selling lemonade. when they saw that we were being psychics, they laughed at us. we cried and ran inside.
in fifth grade, i used…friendship bracelet string? to wrap pencils with pretty designs and sold them for anywhere from 3 to 6 dollars, depending on the design. business was booming for a while, but it went downhill when people discovered the pencils could not be sharpened and therefor had no function.
my most successful and long-lasting venture took me from sixth to ninth grade. i would buy candy when it went on sale for 25-33 cents and sell it for a dollar. my entire backpack was filled every day. in ninth grade, however, nevada cracked down on junk food and i had to keep it on the down low. 3 boys in my grade caught on and started stealing my customers.
now i just prostitute.
posted by Kelly on 12-12-2007 at 12:09 am
I used to be quite the entrepreneur when I was younger. I would ride my bike down to the local discount retailer, buy up all the toys (squirt guns and those parachuter guys) and candy, and then hock it to the neighborhood kids with a built in profit from a folding table in my front yard.
I also did annual haunted houses out of my basement and every summer held a “carnival” in my front yard. The carnival consisted of a crude obstacle course, a shooting gallery with a rubber band gun with various He-man and G.I. Joe targets, bean bag toss and homemeade bowling alley; all the games had prizes you could earn or purchase.
I would also hold the occasional boxing match between neighborhood kids, that one rarely went over well after a kid would go home to his parents with a black eye.
posted by Michael Smith on 12-12-2007 at 11:19 am
When I was a kid my friend Ishmael and I used to shovel snow. We made quite a bit of money when it snowed.
My friend Ishmael and I filled out all of the paperwork for the free lunches one year. We kept collecting our lunch money from our parents almost the whole school year before my brother turned us in. I don’t think we would have been caught if if weren’t for my brother.
posted by Ken Lay on 12-12-2007 at 2:26 pm
The most money my brother and cousins and I made was from selling rocks that had funny paintings on them, derived from our imaginations. The most popular seller was a rock on which my cousin would write, “I forgot to do the chores so my mother turned me into this rock.” Apparently adults liked that one and paid top dollar for it. Good times.
posted by Isaac Bloomfield on 12-12-2007 at 3:37 pm
I made friendship bracelets from string and sold them at school. They were hugely popular but took forever to make (plus, my eyes would be so tired that I could only make 1 or 2 a day). The best part was that I demanded to be paid in advance so I could buy the string which resulted in a long line of disgruntled customers.
posted by GTT on 12-12-2007 at 5:08 pm
Lebetho, my mom did the same thing. I don’t remember what I was paid (pennies, I’m sure) to grade tests and even write her report cards. She taught at the same elementary school I attended, so it was kind of fun scoring my friends’ tests. Looking back, I feel a little weird about it.
posted by Trena on 12-13-2007 at 12:45 pm
When I was a wee one, I helped pick up dog poop using the pooper scoopers. I’d get paid by the turd. When my dad wasnt looking, Sometimes I’d divide the turd into two and get paid more for it! So from a young age I was exposed to crappy labor. This very possibly could have contributed to the fact that I have never had a job to this day (I’m 18 now).
posted by David on 12-17-2007 at 4:39 am
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posted by Nadine Aroyo on 12-18-2007 at 7:18 am