Father Shreds Savings to Stop Son From Obsessing About Money, Which of Course Backfires Spectacularly
It’s tough to parent among the trials and pressures of a consumerist society. How do we teach our kids to handle money responsibly, but not value money above all other things? I honestly don’t know how to raise a person who is financially secure but also doesn’t put too much value on money, because I don’t know how to be that person. I only know how to be a person who spends too much money on lipstick and then frets about her lack of a 401k. But one father’s attempt to teach his son not to think too much about money backfired spectacularly and did the exact opposite, because he shredded his life savings to teach his son not to obsess about money, and his son spent the next several months obsessively and painstakingly pasting it all back together again.
According to Shanghaiist, the 85-year-old patriarch had recently sold a home for 200,000 yuan, or just over $30,000. His son was reportedly advising him to put the money in a bank, and the father thought that his son was thinking too much about the money. He wanted to teach his son a lesson about overvaluing money and demonstrate to them that even a large pile of money won’t do a person much good, so he took drastic action and shredded almost all of it.
“Forget about the money!” he reportedly told his shocked son and daughter-in-law.
$21,000 of the treasure was shredded into teeny, tiny little pieces, smaller than even a commercial shredder would have made it. It certainly made a statement. But if the father’s goal was to make his son and daughter-in-law obsess less over the money, his plan backfired, because his son and daughter-in-law had access to paste and a whole lot of time.
China Daily reports that the couple worked from 7 a.m. to midnight every day from October until January, just pasting the money back together like the world’s most expensive and annoying jigsaw puzzle. They did it, too! They managed to glue all 1,080 bills back together, and the bank exchanged the pasted-together notes for new ones, which the son promptly deposited in the bank.
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