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By CATHY JETT
Tara Byrd's grandmother had a homespun but memorable way of imparting sage financial advice.
"A woman can spoon more out the back door than a man can shovel in the front," Irma Conley always used to say.
"The idea was for a woman to be frugal in the kitchen by not wasting even small amounts of food and, in doing so, contribute to the household's financial success," said Byrd, who lives in Bowling Green.
The advice stuck.
When Byrd grew up and married, she and her daughters developed creative ways of turning leftovers into tasty meals.
"Now I'm the grandmother and I still try to not throw out food!" she said.
Like Byrd, most people get their first lessons in money management from family members. So what better way to honor the women in your life this Mother's Day than by celebrating their cherished pearls of financial wisdom?
Take the advice Brenda Morris Shelton of Stafford County got from her mother, Hazel Morris, just before she married Aubrey Shelton. It was: "Always feather your nest, because you never know if love is going to last."
So Shelton, now assistant vice president of the National Bank of Fredericksburg, diligently put a little bit of cash aside whenever she could.
That nest egg came in handy years later when her husband wanted to buy a used tractor. The banks had closed and they needed more cash than they could get from an ATM. Her husband was eager to close the deal, and asked if they had any money at home.
"I said, 'I'll see,'" Shelton said with a laugh.
She gave him the cash, and he paid her back after he fixed up the tractor and resold it for a tidy profit. The money went right back into her secret nest egg.
"It makes me feel more secure," Shelton said. "It's a little bit of cushion."
For Beverly Beach of Spotsylvania County, the key piece of financial advice she received growing up would be her "super shopper" mom's admonition never to buy anything unless it was discounted 70 percent.
"Now you might think that idea is ridiculous, but you don't know my mother, Helen Snellings," Beach said. "She is the greatest bargain shopper I've ever known. She gets great delight in sniffing out super sales and discounts. Just last week she bought $76 worth of merchandise for $7.96 do the math!"
Snellings won't even consider buying an item until it is marked down at least 50 percent. But she prefers to pounce at the final markdown, using store coupons and/or her senior-citizen discount to knock the price down even further.
"Unfortunately, I did not inherit her 'super sale' gene, but have fallen heir to some great buys over the years," Beach said. "By the way, did I mention that my mother is 83 years old?"
Passing down such sound financial strategies from mother to daughter is important because studies have shown that most people get their ideas about how to handle their finances from dear old Mom and Dad, said Catherine Williams, vice president of financial literacy for Money Management International.
"One of the best gifts you can give your kids is a $1.99 piggy bank," she said during a phone interview from her office in Chicago. "Just get them in the habit of saving. They connect with saving."
Williams said she and her husband used one of those banks to teach their daughter the value of saving in a fun way. She got to count out the pennies inside to see if they had enough to buy dessert when they went out to dinner.
The value of saving up for something special was driven home years later when they took their daughter to college. The cars parked outside the financial-aid building were "all Hummers and Beemers," Williams said. "I'm driving past them in my nine-year-old VW, putt, putt, putt. We saved [for college] the old-fashioned way."
Williams also said that she believes parents should be honest with their children if they have financial troubles--to a point. They should tell them there's a problem and explain why, but they don't need to go into specifics.
If the family took a vacation even though one parent was out of work, for example, they can explain that's why they're still paying for the trip, she said.
And parents shouldn't let their children off the hook when they make financial mistakes. When her daughter fessed up to bouncing a check for $9.73 at a record store recently, Williams told her to not only pay back the money, but give the store owner more .
"They were being nice and just asked her to make the check good," she said. "I told her, 'No, a check is an implied contract between you and the merchant.' I made her pay the merchant an extra $20 to cover his costs."
And what about the advice Williams got from her own mother? It was: "A woman always needs pin money. You never know what's around the corner."
To this day, Williams says, she never leaves home without $20 stashed in her briefcase.
"If something happens to my purse," she said, "I have $20 to buy a phone card to call home."
To reach CATHY JETT:
Email: cjett@freelancestar.com
