For example, when my sister and I were still studying at Maria Montessori Cooperative School (MMCS) my mom would join the bazaar hosted by the school to sell various items. We would help (well, sort of help) by manning the booth or carrying stuff for our mom. I remember once she sold cactuses because my mom is really into gardening.
At our little porch in the rented two-story apartment where we lived, my mom would open a very small sari sari store that would sell the usual stuff that sari sari stores sell such as candy. (I would often be punished because in my mind I thought the candy was for us her children and would take what I wanted when I wanted). Eventually, I realized that the store was selling the candy and so I stopped taking it.
In grade school, my parents made sure I would learn how to enroll myself in school, even to the point of paying for my tuition by myself. St. Scholastica’s College made that easy for me because they had a checklist of all the activities you had to go through to enroll yourself. So it was really just a matter of getting the checklist then ticking off each activity when you had finished doing it. The last step was paying for the tuition and getting the official receipt, then bringing both the checklist and the OR home to my parents for their approval. I remember I would do this as early as Grade 4. Of course, being a child I was a bit nervous about doing all this myself, especially since the other kids had their parents along with them to do this for them. But I realize now that my parents must have trusted me a lot and known all along that I was capable enough to be independent as early as that age.
My mom also made sure we saved money from our allowances in little bamboo “piggy banks” that she brought home. This had a double effect on us – on the one hand, we learned how to put money regularly in the piggy banks. However, we also learned how to remove money from the piggy banks whenever we wanted to buy snacks or candy. So that wasn’t so good. But the lesson there was that after the piggy banks were reasonably full, we would bring the money to the bank for deposit.
Because of the TV commercials of Lea Salonga for the Banco Filipino bank, I nagged my father to help me open a kiddie bank account at Banco Filipino. Lea Salonga was my idol and I thought that I’d be more like her if I opened a kiddie bank account. The good part is that instilled in me at such a young age the value of having your own bank account and saving money regularly. However, Banco Filipino was not a well run bank and eventually it folded due to bank runs. My mom had such an awful time getting my money out of the bank because I forgot what my signature was. But I think eventually she was able to withdraw all my money from my kiddie bank account and I presume it’s stashed away somewhere safe (we never talk about it anymore nowadays).
Then of course there was the weekly marketing that my mother assigned to me. Every week when I had reached adolescence, she would give me a marketing budget for the food of our family. It was my task to go to the wet market (sometimes alone, sometimes with the maid) and shop for the food. This was very important in my business training because it taught me to divide the weekly budget into the reasonable portions for each item that I had to buy. It also taught me to be accountable for money entrusted to me so I had to learn how to write a record of the money spent and what it was spent on to present to my mother for approval.
My father, on the other hand, trained me and my sister in how to earn money (not just saving it or investing it). When my sister and I were in my father’s office, he would give us secretarial tasks such as helping him file away documents. I learned how to punch holes in folders so the documents could be properly filed in them. I also learned how to control my handwriting when creating labels for the folders. I envied my sister at this because her handwriting was way better than mine (and to this day, she still has the better handwriting between the two of us). My father paid us for these tasks, of course. Another task my father assigned to me was to weed the lawn of our house in BF Homes. For some strange reason, I don’t remember him assigning this task to my older brother or sister, ever. My deal with my father was that the weeds I pulled up had to have intact roots to be deemed eligible for payment. If I couldn't present the weed intact with its whole roots, I would only get half price for my effort. At first, I tried to argue with my father about this, until I realized that his decision was final and could not be changed.
The point to all this training was that my parents were able to give us an idea of the basics of business which are: a) that you have to work to earn money – only a minority of people get a free ride through life; b) that you have to be responsible with the money you earn, by saving what you have earned and then putting the money away in the bank; and c) that money can help you buy what you need, if you’re careful with it. My parents also taught me to be accountable for other people’s money and that if you are consistently honest with how you use other people’s money then you get rewarded for your honesty. So I have to say that my parents really knew what they were doing by making us go through all that starting from a young age.
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