What was your biggest misconception about money when you were a child?

74jax

silvercar said:

My adult kids still don't understand cheques. They usually end up with me having to bank them into their accounts. They can't understand why someone would go to the effort of writing a cheque and then posting it to them, when they could transfer money online.

My daughter doesn't understand why I like to use my card instead of my phone to pay for things.....  I don't think she has ever seen a cheque 😂

Primrose

Every time somebody uses their phone to pay for something it uses that little bit of extra power which has to be replaced later when their  phone is recharged .  Seems miniscule for one person but consider how many million phone paymenttransactions are performed every day and what that,s doing for electricity supplies and the  planet.  I suppose card machines also use energy too.  I don,t know how the two compare.

I wonder whether anybody in government has ever looked at all these micro actions that occur in our day to day lives  to estimate how much energy collectively as a nation they,re costing us and wether it,s worth changing our ways.    Somehow good old fashioned cash suddenly seems less of a climate change offender.  We,re all guilty of ignoring or not even considering the potential impact of these "micro" activities yet collectively as a nation I reckon we could get them to make a significant impact. 

Perhaps I should be a responsible citizen and start a new thread to elicit suggestions?

FarmGirl78

The cost of dry cleaning.

When I was at school my Mum would never let me buy coats or dresses that needed dry-cleaning. I mean like a school coat, which would only be washed once every blue moon anyway, or a party dress which might be worn once every 6 months. And looking at clothes in shops I would always hear "Put that back! We're not buying that! Its dry clean only!!" and the one occasion I did actually end up owning something that was dry clean only all I'd hear was "DON'T GET IT DIRTY! I'M NOT PAYING FOR THAT TO BE CLEANED!".

My parents had enough money, We were blessed that we never went without, went on relatively expensive holidays and I know they saved enough to pay off their mortgage years early. My Mum's irrational fear of dry-cleaning costs led me to believe that it was probably about £35 to get something cleaned. So the first time I took a pair of trousers to be cleaned in my mid 20's and the woman said £3.95 I assumed that was a 10% deposit and asked when did I pay the rest. The woman couldn't believe I was expecting to pay £39.50, and I couldn't believe it was costing less than a McDonalds. 🤣

Primrose

I learned the cost of dry cleaning early on in married life when my husband wanted a rather expensive silk tie dry cleaned !  It cost nearly as much as the tie to buy. Thereafter I  always gave clothes which needed dry cleaning a wide berth.  But I also learned that  this was just sometimes a label manufacturers -put on items to protect themselves and that often if you gently  handwashed "dry clean only" items in warm soap water and drip dried them outdoors instead of subjecting them to the rough agitations of a washing machine and its spinning action you could get away with defying the instructions.

Primrose

I should add that as a child I had no idea how hard adults had to work to provide all those domestic items which appeared as if by magic.    My parents, by instituting the habit of extremely modest amounts of pocket money and educating me on how best to spend it  certainly helped open my eyes to that illusion, a habit for which as an adult I,ve always been extremely grateful.