This Narratively “longread” about the history behind the hip Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco’s Mission District was an intriguing father-son story.

Part of it involved entrepreneurial parents trying to pass on important financial skills to their children, like this excerpt involving the father Ned:

Every day, a group of homeless would line up outside the store, and Ned would feed them a sandwich and soda. No questions asked; no thank you needed. He was generous to his kids, too, but not without strategy or purpose. He’d pay them twenty dollars a day for their work at the market, a decent wage in the ’70s. If the kids agreed to save their earnings in the bank, Ned would double it. If they didn’t, that was all they got. Over the years, each child managed to save $20,000, thanks to Ned’s matching practice. “That’s how I encourage them to work and save money,” Ned says. “Sometimes you have to do your tricky things if you love your children.”

I found it amusing that when his son Sam decided to start his own small business, instead of worrying about him going broke, that actually made him feel more at ease.

“He was excited that I was going to be in control of my own destiny, even though it was a restaurant,” says Sam. “Pursuing entrepreneurship was following a path that he knew, that he was comfortable with.”

I would think most parents would rather their kid go the “safe” route of relying on a professional degree like lawyer, doctor, finance, or engineer.

I enjoy collecting anecdotes like this. Here are past related posts:

• Teaching Kids to be Entrepreneurs: Jack’s Cosmic Hot Dogs
• The Opposite of Spoiled Book Review: Kids and Money
• The Best Advice For A Teenager Looking For a Job
• Charlie Munger on Teaching Character Values in Childhood

In the book The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber, there are a number of tips and tricks presented to help teach your kids to be good with money:

The foundation of the book is a detailed blueprint for the most successful ways to handle the basics: the tooth fairy, allowance, chores, charity, saving, birthdays, holidays, cell phones, checking accounts, clothing, cars, part-time jobs, and college.

As I read through them, most of them were never found in my own childhood. I was never given a wad of money to buy my own school clothes. I didn’t have a fancy save/spend/give jar system. I had chores, but was never paid for them. There was no forced or guided philanthropy. My parents didn’t pay me interest on my savings. When confronted with the fact that all my friends had allowances, my parents eventually relented and gave me… a dollar a week. This was sometime in high school.

I’m not saying that all these clever little schemes don’t help to create financial skills. I plan to use some of them myself. But we should also focus on the core values and character traits that lead to good behavior in general. Indeed, this is also acknowledged in the book:

Finally, I want to help all of you recognize that every conversation about money is also about values. Allowance is also about patience. Giving is about generosity. Work is about perseverance. Negotiating their wants and needs and the difference between the two has a lot to do with thrift and prudence.

So I took many of the topics in the book and tried to connect them with the corresponding character traits in the big graphic shown above.

There are many other ways to encourage your kids to learn traits like patience, perseverance, curiosity, or delayed gratification. Many have been part of cultures and/or religions for centuries. The first way kids learn is by watching their parents, so we must be good examples as well. (I know, can’t I just buy an app or something instead? I mean, thanks Mom and Dad!)

Here’s a follow-up post to The Best Advice For A Teenager Looking For a Job. One of the podcasts I regularly listen to is the Alton Browncast (of “Good Eats” fame). Many topics are food-related but often it boils down to him talking with really interesting people. In one of his earlier episodes, he did an interview with Jack Hurley, who is the owner of Jack’s Cosmic Dogs near Charleston, South Carolina.

Jack Hurley has started 6 restaurants and a few other businesses. Early in the interview, he discusses the creation of his popular, retro hot dog stand. It turns out, Jack wanted to start a simple business so that he could give his kids a job and teach them how to run a restaurant. His two sons were a freshman and sophomores in high school at the time. Here’s my transcript of that part of the podcast:

…We had to make it simple for high school kids to do… I told my sons, now watch this, your mom and I are going to create this place in one month, we’re going to paint it, do the logo, do the recipes, in one month. I want you to understand, that if at some point in your life you are tired of working for The Man, that you have this creative gene in you. We’re going to do this so fast it’s going to shock you.

Obviously not every parent will have the means or ability to do this, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea (and their hot dogs look yummy). From what I can tell, Cosmic Dogs has been around now for over 10 years, so I wonder if his sons indeed took to the entrepreneurial path?

I really enjoyed this article by James Altucher called “The Best Advice Ever To A Teenage Daughter Who Needs To Make Money“. His kid is considering taking an $8 an hour job, presumably in either the food or retail industry. Why not? The first three items on my complete job history were certainly along those lines, along with nearly everyone else including these comedians. But he has some alternative advice, here is just a snippet:

I said to her, instead of that: why don’t you go to Lynda.com or CodeAcademy.com and learn basic WordPress skills. You can make blogs for stores.

It would take you ONE DAY to learn the basics.

Then go from door to door to every store in town.

Say for $1000, plus $50 / month maintenance, you’ll make their blog or basic website for them and help them upkeep it. If they require a “shopping cart” then charge them $2500.

She frowned a little and said, “They will say No. They don’t need it.”

She doesn’t want anyone to say No to her. I can relate to that. I don’t like it when people say No to me either.

I said, “Ok, we have about 40 stores on this street. Let’s say only 2 say yes. That’s $2000. It will take you ten hours to do the work.

That’s $200 an hour instead of $8 an hour.

Now, a lot of people seem to think learning coding = rich kid these days. But I think his point is more about getting out there and “making something out of nothing”. Right now, a WordPress blog is probably the easiest way to do that (ahem). Also, it’s about just getting out there, trying some stuff, and seeing what works and what doesn’t. If you start a self-employed business, you will pick up most of the subsequent skills he talks about – accepting rejection, dealing with failure, salesmanship, communication, customer service, creativity, competitiveness.

If either of my daughters has that independent wrinkle in her brain like her old man does, I’d like to nurture it.

Here are some other money-making options that I’ve though of, although the environment may be different when they finally become teenagers.

• Buy things at garage sales or local stores and then resell them on eBay or Amazon Marketplace.
• Make your own crafts and sell on Etsy.
• Start a stand at the local farmer’s market or weekend flea market.
• Design or invent something and figure out how to get a factory in China to build it for you.
• Start a YouTube channel (learn video production and editing skills).

On the other hand, I actually think a menial $8 an hour job is still working taking on, if only to experience firsthand how tough it is.