Money laundering
I must confess that I recently got involved in some “money laundering.” My wife popped into our bedroom the other night and waved a water-and-suds-soaked 500-peso bill in the air. Dripping with accusation, she wondered aloud if anyone had left money in the pocket of their pants which ended up inside the washing machine. I, of course, denied all knowledge and culpability until she came back five minutes later with a fistful of soggy P500 and P1,000 bills. To my horror, I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten all about the bills that I had stuffed deep inside my pants pocket earlier that morning. After a long day around the city in the bad weather, I felt so tired, wet, and dirty that I simply tossed my pants in the hamper without a second thought. I jumped out of bed and spent the next half-hour furiously wiping the bills. Fortunately, none were torn although they now felt funny. Maybe the fabric softener made them too smooth. In any case, I decided to randomly mix them up with some old bills to roughen them up a little. The ink on many of the bills seemed to have also lightened and the front face of one of the 1,000-peso notes had badly faded. I held it up against the light and while the “see-through register” of the images of Jose Abad Santos, Vicente Lim, and Josefa Escoda still came out, I resigned myself to the conclusion that it was a fake.
If my young (and still very innocent) children were still awake at the time and had witnessed my crime, they would have matter-of-factly advised me to simply go to the ATM machine, as if it was some eternal spring, and get more money. “Bless the beasts and the children …” the Carpenters once sang. I sure wish that it was that simple. Just like most people, I spend a significant amount of time thinking about money. And now that my kids are getting older, I find myself spending even more time thinking about whether they’ll earn “enough” when they eventually go out on their own. As a parent, how should I prepare them for that reality? During my generation, most parents advised their children to select a college course that would lead to a job that would yield the highest financial rewards. Should I teach them how to become rich? Today’s society reinforces that belief more so and even communist China’s Deng Xiaoping once famously proclaimed, “To be rich is glorious!” Indeed, many experts now recommend that we teach our kids about building wealth early on. Some even go so far as to say it should be the fourth “R” in education: reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic . . . and richness.
But what if my kids don’t really want to become business executives, investment bankers, or high-priced doctors and lawyers? What if they had other “non-lucrative” inclinations such as music, art, or teaching instead? When my son was four, he dreamed of becoming a security guard. He even got his grandmother to get him a real guard’s hat and uniform, which he wore when he did the rounds in our neighborhood. Granted that it may just have been a toddler’s passing fancy, but should I discourage him from pursuing it if it wasn’t?
When teaching our kids about wealth and money, maybe the better approach is to teach them more about defense rather than offense. While I understand why many people believe it’s important to instill in them a sense of entrepreneurship and an internal drive to accumulate wealth, perhaps we should also equally focus on encouraging them to lead simple lifestyles. Amid the earn-and-spend culture of modern society, I think we should spend more time making our children appreciate more the concepts of scarcity, of need vs. want, of value vs. style, and the virtue of saving and living within one’s means. This way, the emphasis won’t be so much about making money but on how wisely you use it.
I visited my favorite bank manager last week, still feeling very sore for losing P1,000 to counterfeiters. For a split second, I thought about really laundering my P1,000 bill. I thought about carefully folding it to conceal the faded portion and nonchalantly ask the manager to change it into smaller bills. I decided instead to ask her to check it under their ultraviolet light and confirm my worst expectation. She came back a few minutes later with a smile and handed me two crisp 500-peso bills in exchange. I heaved a big sigh of relief. After all the rinsing, soaping, soaking, and spinning it went through, I should have known it was clean!
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