Lunch Money

Greg Kenton is very talented: He is good at sports, schoolwork, singing, playing piano, and drawing. His biggest talent, however, is making money: He is a natural at it.

At age four, noticing that his sloppy brothers Ross and Edward hate cleaning their rooms to get their allowances, Greg offers to do the cleanup for a small fee: roughly two dollars a week for the both of them. His mom finally insists the brothers do the cleaning, but in two years Greg has $200.

He also takes out and sorts the trash and is allowed to keep can-and-bottle deposit refunds, amounting to four dollars a month in winter and eight dollars a month in summer. At ages seven and eight, he makes spare change by polishing his parents’s shoes, cleaning heel marks from kitchen floor tiles, weeding, debugging shrubs, and so on.

He loves sorting and staring at the cash and studying it under a magnifying glass, and he becomes a coin collector. Now and then, he spends money on things he loves, like a big flashlight or baseball cards. By third grade, he has decided his goal is to be rich. Other kids want to get rich, too, but Greg is already doing something about it.