Who is Rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody. -- Benjamin Franklin


The Stroddys have always had a precarious relationship with money. It isn’t just that we’d like to have more money, or even that we mistrust money. Rather, if you plotted our relationship with money, vis-à-vis the SAT questions about correlation, it might look like this:

Stroddy : Money ---as--- Wile E. Coyote : x

Where x, of course, is the Road Runner, always just out of reach; plus, we’ve never really come up with a viable plan that’s been any better than all the PREVIOUS schemes we’ve already tried.

I think most of America is in this boat, especially now that we’re finally calling it a Recession.

I also think, though, that the Stroddys have taken things to a whole new, deeper level, at least compared to our peer group.

Bottle deposits are an alternative source of income for us – we usually get a 1099 form from Meijer around the first week of February – and we’ve even found ourselves in what one comedian describes as “rolling-pennies-for-gas-money broke.”

You know what I mean – scrounging through the ashtray in your car to come up with an acceptable minimum amount of money to buy gas ("let’s see, I have two $1 bills, if I can find one more quarter, hmm, I think $4 wouldn’t look so bad…”) Kind of hilarious that we all need to make sure we’re putting on a good face for the lady with the hair curlers working the gas station checkout counter – but apparently, we think she must make millions working behind that counter selling cigarettes, and we wouldn’t want to seem poor or anything…

The Stroddys have also written checks for less than $2 -- in line at a grocery store to buy milk one time, I realized I’d spent my last $5 in cash on lunch that afternoon and didn’t have my debit card with me.

We’re re-gifters (Seinfeld reference, if you didn’t know.) Multiple, multiple, times. (By the way, to anyone who got the re-gifted wicker wine-bottle holders that somebody gave us as a previous Christmas gift, you have my apologies…)

This financial pinch goes back far in my family tree. My dad’s father worked for 50 cents a week plus room and board during the Great Depression, and I can remember that same grandfather selling shoes through catalog orders people would give him, right up until the time he had his second stroke.

My mom’s family was even poorer. They had an icebox instead of a refrigerator when my mom was growing up (well past the time when refrigerators were available, I’m sure), and grew much of their own food – and they didn’t live on a farm, their house was in the city limits of Mt. Morris. Hard to imagine people living quite that way today, with corn stalks and tomato plants and rows of bean plants in your yard right next to the apple trees. They even had a cow for milk…

To me though, the most fascinating story about them is this: One year my mom’s youngest brother received two things for Christmas: a tire and a rope; and he enjoyed them both immensely. It was a great Christmas.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

So when my wife suggested a few months ago that we sign up for a series of financial seminars our church was giving, she was surprised, I think, that I didn’t present any argument for why we shouldn’t do it. So here we are, some nine or ten weeks into the program, which I’ll admit has gone very well. We still haven’t gotten to the parts about Lottery Tickets as an investment tool (not that we’ve ever played the Lottery, but, hey, I was just wondering) nor has there been any mention of bottle deposits, but it’s still been worthwhile.

I can see little changes happening in our kids, as well. We’ve started to move away from trying to give them an ‘allowance’ – a term the seminar leader shuns in the DVD series – and instead are trying to get them to work on a commission system to earn spending money.

Our oldest son worked this past weekend at a neighbor’s house, picking up sticks in his yard for $5 an hour. This sort of thing hadn’t happened before – but what can I say? Maybe our kids are finally embracing their parent’s lack of abundant wealth. Or maybe they’re brains are biologically preparing for the worst. They’ve lived with their parents’ lifestyle long enough that they’ve begun a sort of Darwin-esque adaptation in preparation for some impending financial storm that surely must be coming.

Whatever the reason, I was glad to see Ethan outside working.

Our financial peace seminar instructor would want us to have alternate sources of income to fall back on; and if I lose my job some day, at least Ethan will be able to list ‘professional stick picker-upper’ on his resume.