The day my dad taught me a lesson about money

My first real lesson about money lasted a lifetime

The old Bamberger’s where I learned a valuable lesson about money. Photo courtesy of The Department Store Museum.

I’m going to tell you a story about how I came to value money.

When I was very young, maybe five, my father took me with him to buy my mother a Christmas present. Maybe it was a birthday present, I don’t remember. But one of the goals of this trip, apparently, was to teach me how to use money. I was at that age.

We were in the jewelry department at the old Bamberger’s. I don’t remember the present. Hell, it may not even have been the jewelry department, though in my mind’s eye it looks like it was the jewelry department. It may not have even been Bamberger’s though I’m pretty sure it was. I had a little wallet with a zipper pocket for coins. Whatever the bill was, my dad paid the dollar portion and I paid the cents. I guess I was learning how to count, and learning how to use money.

I pulled out a bunch of coins, and one fell on the ground, a dime, a penny, something small. I don’t remember exactly what. I didn’t pick it up, and it wasn’t because I didn’t realize it fell. I didn’t pick it up because it was a small coin. It wasn’t valuable to me. I remember thinking that. My dad noticed that I hadn’t picked up the coin and pointed this out to me.

“It’s just a penny,” I said, (or a dime, or whatever it was), real dismissive.

Now, for all those details I’m hazy about, this next part I remember like it was yesterday. My dad laid into me. I got the entire immigrant story. About how he was poor growing up, how he shared a room with his brothers, how he had to wear their hand-me-downs. About how when he was my age he had nothing and I had everything. All of it. You never, ever, throw away money, he said, something like that. And he meant it. He didn’t yell, he didn’t curse, my dad wasn’t like that. But he was pissed. It was visceral. He could not believe I was so cavalier about money. It infuriated him. He made me pick up that goddamned coin and he made sure I understood that every single penny mattered. Money could change your life, if you valued it. He made that very, very clear to me. And that lesson stuck with me for the rest of my life.

I became a cash-is-king kind of person. The kind of person who rolled up pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into those little paper sleeves and brought them to the bank. To me, cash was money. Bills and coins were real. They mattered. I didn’t get a credit card until I was in my mid-20s because credit wasn’t real to me. It still isn’t to be honest. I have a mortgage and credit cards and a credit score just like everybody else, of course, but I still don’t think of that stuff as money. If you can’t touch it, it’s not money. That was a fundamental belief to me. Credit, in my mind, was one big scam. It still is to be honest.

The thing that did finally forced me to question my beliefs about money ended up being the least tangible kind of money you can imagine.

I first heard about bitcoin in 2013 when I was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. At first it was just a colorful, crazy story but it was a hard one to figure out. Understanding bitcoin wasn’t intuitive, and explaining it to other people was even harder. But to be able to write about it, I had to understand it, the mechanics of it, the concepts behind it. This was so early there wasn’t even a good book to read that could explain it to me. I had to figure it out on my own, read the bitcoin white paper, go on the message boards and read what the coders and developers were saying, talk to people who were using it. It was like trying to teach yourself how an internal combustion engine works.

The common rebuttal to bitcoin back then was “bitcoin’s not money.” Money is dollar bills. Money is your bank account. Money is your checkbook. Money is your credit card. Bitcoin wasn’t any of those things, so how could it be money? And the more I turned that debate around in my mind, the more I came to understand what bitcoin really was and how it really worked, the more it forced me to ask myself a fundamental question that I had never even considered before, because I always thought I knew the answer:

What is money?

If two people can exchange value, no matter the medium, can that medium be considered money? If it can’t, why? What is money? Bitcoin wasn’t tangible, but it served the same purpose as bills and coins. And look, I’m not here saying bitcoin is money—bitcoin has a lot of problems and I don’t think it ever will actually come to be used as money. But what bitcoin showed, to me at least, was that money wasn’t the paper bills. It wasn’t the coins, or the checkbook, or the credit cards. Money is a system, a way for a society to keep track of all its valuable stuff and record who owns it and who owes what to whom. Money is basically a giant balance sheet, a universal ledger.

But that just raises an even bigger question: Why do people get so obsessed over a balance sheet? That was a question I couldn’t answer. It took me years to finally come up with what I think is a satisfactory answer: Money, thanks to a crazy series of twists and turns over the course of millennia, has come to be a religion. Money is our god. The way people thought about the gods 5,000 years ago is how we think about money today. Money is The Almightier.

That may sound crazy, but when my book comes out this summer and I finally tell this story, I think you’ll see I’m right. If we’re really going to fix the system that leaves so many people in despair and struggling and trapped in debt we’re going to need to change how we see money. But what I trace out is a deeply, deeply entrenched attitude, and attitudes like that don’t flip overnight, not even for me. I have spent years thinking about money, and my beliefs about it have changed radically, but in some ways I am still that kid inside Bamberger’s. Today I got lunch at Shake Shack. The guy behind the counter gave me my change (yes, I order at the counter not the kiosk, and pay cash not credit) and I dropped one of the coins. I looked to see what it was. It was a penny.

I picked it up.