money

when i was a child,i used to believe that a "million" is a big bag full of coins

Kafka

When I was 12 or 13, my parents opened a checking account for me to help me learn about financial responsibility. They told me if I wrote a bad check, the sheriff would come to our house and take me to jail. Of course, the sheriff only arrests habitual bad check writers, but they sort of glazed over that part. When I was 22, I bounced a check, and I told my boyfriend I was terrified to go home because the sheriff might be waiting there to take me to jail. He said, "WHAT?" After I explained, he said, "Well, I hate to tell you this, but Santa Claus isn't real, either."

Sofia T

I used to believe you accumulated more money when making a purchase. It made perfect sense when you paid the cashier with a single bill (Ex. $20) and then received many bills in return. Since you had more bills than when you started, you were richer!

Anon

My mother told me that every time I spent a dollar of my allowance, a butterfly would die. Needless to say, I had about 500 dollars racked up by my 8th birthday.

Anon

I used to believe that credit cards had compressed money in them. I thought that every time you swiped your credit card the machine would cut open the credit card, pull just the right money out and seal it back up.

Anon

I used to believe that money was just a verification of wealth, and you only had to show a shopkeeper that you had the money to pay for something, and they would give it to you. So, the first time I payed for something on my own when I was five or six, I showed the shopkeeper five pounds (I live in the UK), grabbed my item, and turned to leave. He wasn't best pleased, but I was adamant that I had payed! In the end, my Nan gave him the money, and I couldn't understand why she was just giving it away! I thought money was like a passport for buying things, and it seemed silly just to give it away! After all, you wouldn't just give your passport away!

Anon

My father was a little worried by my obsession with dimes when I was a toddler. He thought I was avaricious, but couldn't understand why, as I was too young to know about how to spend money. What he didn't know was that I was fascinated by the shiny silver with the perfect pictures on it. And I was convinced that the profile was a portrait of God.

Jennifer Avenell

I used to believe that tiny men lived in shop tills and decided how much each item should cost. I thought that bar codes were their own special language.

Sophie

Some older kids showed us how to file pennies (USA) down to the size of dimes. At this time a bottle of coke from a machine was ten cents. We’d pound nails into a board, around a dime, remove the dime and then use the nails as a guide. We’d keep filing until the penny fit between the nails and under the nail head. As you can imagine, it would take much of an afternoon to come up with five or six dimes. We did this in a shed in back of one of our houses. Knowing this was a federal offense, both in counterfeiting and in defacing a US coin (the penny), we actually stationed lookouts, one at each corner of the front yard, fully expecting a big black car full of Federal Treasury agents to come barreling down the dirt road at any moment.

Allen W.

I used to think that when people talked about the stock market crashing, they said sock market, and that everyone had to wear old socks with holes in them because they couldn't buy new ones.

Julianna

when I was 8 I asked my dad if we could go to disneyland, he told me we didn't have enough money for it, so I suggested we go to the bank to get some. Thats when he had to explain he needs to put the money in before he can take it out. This notion seemed like madness to me, I couldn't figure out what the point of it was, though he did try to explain it to me...but at that moment I realized money doesn't magically come out of an ATM machine.

Anon

I used to belive that when people gave you change at a store, they were making the difference bettween what you paid and what the thing you bought cost, weather you paid less or more.

I had this kick-ass plan where I would buy a diamond with 5cents and become rich.

Myles

My cousin used to tell me he was going to sue me if I played with his toys or did anything else that he didn't like. I believed him thinking he was going to take all my money...where the money was that I thought he could take, being 6-7 years old, is still in question.

Anon

I remember I didn't understand the difference between $1, $10, $20, etc. We would go to the store and my mom would pay with one bill. I thought that meant that you could buy all you wanted for just one dollar. Sometimes we bought lots, but sometimes we would buy just a couple of things, and I used to get upset that we were wasting our dollars when we could have got so much more.

Kelly

I remember as a kid I was totally confused by the trays they somtimes had a stores that had money in them and said "give a penny, take a penny". I thought it meant you should put a penny in it and then take another one out and I didn't get the point of it.

Bootlebat

when i was a child, i used to believe paper notes (money), once become crumpled or soaked wet, would be unacceptable and unuseable. well, mom gave me and my sister (younger than me yet infinitely wiser) a $5 bill one day after school to go get some groceries, I dropped it in the gutter and it was promptly soaked with rain water. my sis picked it up and said it's ok, use it, i grabbed it from her and chucked it out the window, which got blown away immediately. my sis saw such horror on my face, not because she thought I did such a stupid thing as throwing away good money, but that I made it wet in the first place!

eric

Back in elementary school, my class was learning about the different coins and the presidents represented on them. Several people in my class thought that JFK must have been the smallest president, because his picture was on the smallest coin, the dime.

Maeghan Jade

When check books used to have that thick purple carbon paper in it, my mom would hand it to me to throw away, but make me hold it with the very tips of my finger and thumb. She was very specific that I not to touch it, but wouldn't tell me that she just didn't want me to get ink on me or my clothes, because it might be difficult to get out. She would just say, "You don't want to get it on you, trust me." So I always thought it was something like an acid that would eat away at my skin and was deathly afraid of it. I was in my early 20's before realizing carbon paper was harmless!

Lee

My father once saw me put a quarter in my mouth, and told me that "I should never do that, because someone might have put it in their ass." For years, when I would see someone limping, or just walking funny, I thought I knew why.

Buhbs

When I was younger proabaly around the time I was 5 to 7 years old when my family and I went to the mall my two older brothers told me the maniquins were people who didn't pay thier credit card debt to the stores and were killed and filled with concerte to pay for thier debt. I used to worry everytime my parents bought something.

Jean_Rain