Petulia Clarke, Staff ReporterShe said she just has to have at least $200 every Friday night for a meal at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
She "can't get less than $500" to go to a matinee at Portmore Palace on Saturday afternoons and on Sundays, she'd "die without the $60" for a 'nutty buddy' from the ice cream man.
CDs, "at least one every month" at $600 each sets her back $7,200 for the year, and magazines with her favourite pin-up artistes cost $75 each at the bookstore.
Add occasionally buying a friend lunch, "buying jewellery, sweets, stickers and stuff", and her monthly expenditure could run past the $2,000 mark.
Thirteen-year-old Kerry-Ann Allen says she keeps a strict list of her expenditure in a notebook. With the only money coming in now being $150 a day that she gets from her mother for lunch, plus $500 every two weeks as pocket money, she has no choice but to ensure that she saves enough to meet her demands.
Her mother Lorraine, an accountant, who also has nine-year-old twin boys, said that she had no choice but to limit the amount of money she gave her children after they continued to exhibit bad choices that "centred mainly around broken toys and useless dolls and paint sets."
"My daughter was heavily into glitter at one point," she said, "it just had to stop. She used to get money from her grandmothers, aunts and my husband and I, it would be CDs, pens, pretty notebooks, stickers and other useless things that just sat in the room after a few days. I'd buy her notebooks and she'd go spend money on the ones with Britney Spears on it. I'd loan her money for 'something teacher said I had to get', and I wasn't getting paid back as promised. It really had to stop."
She added: "One of the boys saves a lot, sometimes when I'm broke I can go to him and he always has money. He keeps these secret stashes around the house and he's like a bank. The other spends every free money he has on marbles, Pokemon cards and video games".
She said that she realised early that if left alone, her children would spend themselves silly.
"We had to decide to cut down her allowance to just $500 now and then, plus lunch money, and I've noticed that she's become wiser as far as what and how to spend. The boys have to make do for now on lunch money alone."
For the children of driver Clifford White, spare money only comes in the form of what they can save from their lunch money as well as funds he and other family members give them occasionally. Mr White has three children 14 and 12-year-old daughters and an eight-year-old son who's into video games.
"They get lunch money, and whenever they just want a money for fast food, field trips or just a pocket money I give them," he said. His 14-year-old, who is on the swim team at school spends her extras on essentials like clothes and shoes.
"The 12-year-old is the 'jinnal'," he said. "She takes her money and is a miser with it, I'm amazed sometimes at how much she has back at the end of the week." He said that what makes him especially proud of all three is that they all have piggy banks at home, plus savings accounts at the bank.
"Everything they get from family goes into the bank," he said. "What really amazed me was that the 12-year-old wanted a pair of shoes recently, and had $1,000+ in her savings with which she bought it all by herself."
Entertainment for the children lies greatly now with church and Sunday school and the computer. They are not allowed to spend any great amounts of time on the machine, as Mr White also makes them wary of high electric bills by comparing bills now, to those that existed before the computer.
"Nowadays, you can't just tell children that money doesn't grow on trees", Michael Morgan, a security guard who has four children aged between six and 18 said. "When they see you in the bank line and at the money machine, you have to also tell them that God just don't put the money there, you have to work for it first."
Unlike middle-class Americans, he said, many Jamaican parents do not have the type of money to go around where they can just give children money weekly. He said that maybe that's why many children here don't get their expectations up enough to get into any sort of financial bind.
"I was reading this thing in the paper to my 10-year-old son that said that I should sit down and work out a budget for my children based on necessities like school, lunch money and bus fare," he said. I followed the advice and I realised that the younger ones feel a little important when they get even 10 dollars and work out what they're going to spend it on".
Mr Morgan said that last summer, his children realised that if they wanted video games and movies, they would have to find ways of earning the money themselves. He said that they all got together in a 'cool-aid' business, where they emptied their savings, bought limes, cool aid and sugar, made drinks and sold it to the neighbours. They got enough money for movies for two weeks.
Delroy Graham, public relations officer for the City of Kingston (COK) credit union, said that the credit union offers a special COK CARES (Children Are Really Enthusiastic Savers) account for children one year to 17 years old.
Children can start accounts with a minimum of $51 and any child can be a part. The main benefit of the account is that there's a quarterly interest of two per cent tax free and parents can access loans of up to six times the savings for educational purposes. COK representatives, Mr Graham said, has targeted basic to high schools in the Corporate Area and have found very enthusiastic savers. Up to December 2000, there were more than 9,000 members in the programme.
He encourages children to take in their piggy banks on Mondays, when the credit union accepts coins, where accounts can be opened at all locations. Other banks and credit unions have attractive savings packages for children.
"You have to give them an attractive alternative to spending money on foolishness," Mrs. Allen said. "You have to explain to them the connection that work has with paycheques, the connection between taxes and the paycheque and the necessity of budgeting at all times. You have to show them that if you don't work the extra hours sometimes, there's no money to go around." She said that she sits her children down at the end of each month, and they all go through the telephone, electricity and other bills together and make suggestions on how each can go lower.
