When I was a child, I used to empty my coin bank out onto my bedspread. Each coin had a face on it, so that was enough for my imagination to imbue them with personalities. I had my coins chatting with each other about all sorts of things.

My mother once caught me at this and it set off all sorts of alarms for her. She didn’t like that I was playing with my money.

I once heard her telling a neighbor that I was a miser. Ten years old and already being labelled as a miser! This was because I had several banks that I had labelled with different financial goals. One was for CANDY, one was for GIFTS and one was for TRIP. (I got the idea from a graphic image on the side of one of the banks that showed a girl with a bank that said “Trip to Paris”. I had learned to budget from seeing that image, without even knowing that that was what I was doing!) I received a weekly allowance of 50 cents which I then divided between the banks. Sometimes I would dump out the money from the various banks and count it to see how much I had accumulated. When she saw me happily counting my savings, that must have conjured up creepy images for her of Scrooge-like characters.

I can’t blame her. Those images were the result of the social narrative put in place at a time when the country was recovering from The Depression. Movies and books were full of stories of the noble poor being beaten down by the greedy rich. These stereotypes were deeply ingrained back then and still linger.

The message I got back then was was confusing. Was she saying that saving money was bad?

There was a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” atmosphere around money; similar to the response I got later, when asking my parents about sex.

Funny how the negative comments from our parents stick with us like flies on flypaper.  How many of us then take on those negative labels – or spend a lifetime proving them wrong?