Yesterday we opened a bank account for our one year old daughter.  The first reason being a number of friends had included cash in her birthday cards and our sons already had bank accounts as part of their school bank day initiative.  It is only fair that cash gifted to our daughter remain for her and the best place was the bank rather than have it lying around in an envelope to be lost sometime before she comes of age.   

So they all have their own bank account and they are not even seven years old.  One of the nice things is they each received a platypus shaped money box or ‘platybank’ to keep coins until school banking day each Thursday.   They only need to make one deposit per month in order to be paid about 3% interest quarterly.

It is also handy as all five of us started delivering supermarket catalogues last week so the boys could be more in touch with their inner postman.  They loved running from mail box to mail box around our neighborhood, despite being paid a pittance by the catalogue distributor, they should save about $500 each by December.   We are also enjoying the exercise component and can deliver to over 100 households in 30 minutes if on the same block and we deliver on both sides of the same street.

My wife initially questioned why we would bother doing such a sweaty low paying project.  My reply was simple.  Our middle child is as eager as me to save up to buy a large sailboat all five of us can live on.  He kept asking me how we can get rich enough to buy one.  Then two Sundays ago there was a flyer amongst the supermarket junkmail offering a ‘position’ to deliver shopping catalogues to houses in the streets surrounding their primary school.   So we applied.  We also read some reviews by people who had done deliveries for that company in the past and in doing so found the name of another catalogue distributor.  We applied at that company too, stating our suburb and got the job.

Come Sunday last week, I picked up the 380 sets of five different catalogues and we folded them that night with elastic bands and had them all delivered in less than 24 hours and 30 hours earlier than our deadline.

The whole time we were sorting and folding that Sunday night my wife questioned our sanity, until I said:

“Just think in 40 years when our second son tells his own children that his amazing career began at five years old when he used to walk five kilometers delivering junk mail to peoples’ letter boxes.  His own wife will be in awe!”

The lesson is there.  If kids have their own legacy at an early age they can repeat that throughout life and improve on their past performance.