Lunch Money

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  Contents

  Chapter 1: Talent

  Chapter 2: Quarters

  Chapter 3: The Perfect Hammer

  Chapter 4: Units

  Chapter 5: The Girl Across The Street

  Chapter 6: Sour Business

  Chapter 7: Order And Chaos

  Chapter 8: Two Down

  Chapter 9: Apologies

  Chapter 10: Something Fishy

  Chapter 11: Notes

  Chapter 12: A Look

  Chapter 13: Lockout

  Chapter 14: Seventy-Five Percent Of Nothing

  Chapter 15: Lessons

  Chapter 16: Art And Money

  Chapter 17: Selling

  Chapter 18: Complicated

  Chapter 19: Planning

  Chapter 20: Agendas

  Chapter 21: The Question Of Money

  Chapter 22: New Business

  Chapter 23: The Best Interests Of The School

  Chapter 24: Success

  For my dad, Bill Clements

  Chapter 1

  TALENT

  Greg Kenton had heaps of talent. He was good at baseball, and even better at soccer. He had a clear singing voice, and he also played the piano. He was a whiz at sketching and drawing, and he did well at school—reading, science, music, writing, art, math, gym, social studies—the whole deal. But as good as he was at all these things, Greg’s greatest talent had always been money.

  Greg had never taken money lessons. He hadn’t had a money tutor or gone to money camp. His talent with money was natural. He had always understood money. He knew how to save it, how to keep track of it, how to grow it, and most of all, how to make it.

  It takes some kids years and years to figure out that everything is worth something. Not Greg. Sitting in a grocery cart by the door of the supermarket, he had watched with sharp brown eyes as his mom dropped a small metal disk into a red machine. Then she’d turned the crank, and a handful of M&M’s had rattled out into her hand. Greg loved the sweet, crunchy taste, but it wasn’t the candy that had captured his imagination. It was that shiny silver coin.

  While he was still a skinny preschooler with curly brown hair, Greg had learned to keep his eyes and ears open. One day at breakfast his biggest brother, Ross, griped, “How come I have to make my bed? I’m just going to mess it up again tonight.”

  His other big brother, Edward, chimed in, “And cleaning up our rooms every single morning? That’s not fair. Besides, they’re our rooms.”

  His mom had answered, “Yes, but your rooms are in my house, and I like my house tidy. So if you want to keep getting your allowances every Friday, get back upstairs and fix the mess.”

  Ross and Edward had grumbled all the way back to their rooms. Their little brother followed them, and two minutes later Greg had started a housekeeping business: making a bed, ten cents; putting dirty clothes in the laundry, five cents; putting clean clothes away, two cents; and hanging up used towels, three cents each.

  If both his big brothers were complete slobs, and they usually were, Greg earned a little more than two dollars a week—so it was certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme. But that wasn’t what Greg was trying to do. He was perfectly happy to get rich slowly, because being patient is a big part of having money talent. Greg understood that a year has fifty-two weeks. So between the ages of four and six Greg transformed rumpled sheets, used underwear, smelly socks, and soggy towels into beautiful, spendable cash—more than two hundred dollars. Then his mom shut down his business, insisting that Ross and Edward had to do their own chores.

  When he was still in nursery school, Greg had taken charge of recycling the family’s trash. He emptied all the waste baskets at least once a week. At the bins out in the garage, he sorted the newspapers and magazines from the cardboard, the aluminum from the steel, and the plastic from the plastic. As a reward for this service, which took him only ten minutes a week, Greg was allowed to keep the deposit refunds on all the cans and bottles. This added up to about four dollars a month in the cool seasons and eight dollars a month during the long, thirsty summer.

  As a seven and eight-year-old, Greg had found other ways to make money around the house and yard. He shined his dad’s and mom’s dress shoes for fifty cents a pair. He scrubbed black heel marks and old wax off the floor tiles in the kitchen for ten cents a square. He dug dandelions out of the lawn at the rate of four for a nickel. And he picked Japanese beetles off the shrubs for a penny a bug.

  At first Greg enjoyed simply having the money he made. Cash was fun and interesting all by itself. He liked sorting and stacking the bills—singles, fives, tens, twenties, and even a few fifties he’d gotten from his grandparents for Christmas. He studied the faces of the famous presidents, and Alexander Hamilton, too—who he discovered was never president, only the first secretary of the treasury of the United States. He looked at the engraving on the bills with a magnifying glass, studying the tiny face of Lincoln sitting there on his big square chair inside the Lincoln Memorial on the back of every five-dollar bill.

  Greg found the coins just as interesting. He loved making rolls of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, stacks and stacks of them. And the golden Sacagawea dollar coins? He didn’t put them into rolls. He had collected twenty-seven of them, which he kept hidden in a sock in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Every once in a while he’d spread them out on his bed and count them again.

  Greg also became an amateur coin collector. It was exciting to come up with a Mercury dime now and then, and he’d found a couple dozen of those gray pennies that had been made out of steel instead of copper during the Second World War. He had found pennies that were worth ten dollars or more, and that can get a kid thinking.

  As nice as it was to have the money itself, Greg quickly learned it was also fun to spend some now and then. He would spend it for something special, like his own professional-quality soccer ball, or one of those huge aluminum flashlights with six batteries, that could throw a beam of light all the way across the lake at his grampa’s cabin. He bought cool stuff that he really wanted, and mostly when it seemed too long a wait until his birthday or Christmas. He bought collectible baseball cards, and he had also bought a few Beanie Babies and then sold them for a nice profit. Sometimes he bought comic books, but only a few, and only ones that looked like they would become more valuable. Greg loved comics, but he got to read all he wanted for free because his dad collected them.

  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 dreami
ng 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.

  Chapter 2

  QUARTERS

  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.

&
nbsp; “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.