Pokemon Kitty

Well something amazing happened today. My son all of a sudden wanted to sell his old Nintendo DS games and Transformer Toys that he never plays with.

So we hopped on eBay and did a search for his DS games that he wanted to sell. Unfortunately, they only were worth about $5 to $10 dollars. I winced a little at the hurt look on this face. Some of his transformer will go for over $10, but not much more, maybe top side will be $20.

So after a few eBay searches, I asked him why he wanted to sell them… That when he told me. He wanted to buy a new Pokemon DS game that just came out. But just last week he spend all of his money and took a $40 loan out from me to buy a $120 Lego Star Wars ship… And now he’s realizing he should have held off on the purchase! He learned a small lesson in opportunity costs. You see he has about 25 Lego star wars models already, and he’s been waiting for the new Pokemon DS game to come out!

So what lesson did he learn?

• The first lesson, not to go in debt! He won’t be able to afford that DS game until mid summer.
• 2^nd lesson,diminishing returns on the Lego Star Wars ships… I mean how many of these does he really need?
• 3^rd it smart to keep some money aside for be events that are important. So he learned about a weak form of an emergency fund (although it’s not really totally that, it’s similar enough…)

I refused to give him the money to by the new game. To do so would ruin the lesson. I do feel bad that all of his friends will have the game and will have mastered it by the time he finally get it. But I think the lesson is much more important!

So it was a tough day for a nine year old!

-D