Buy High, Sell Low, Too

Today’s post is a quick follow-up to last week’s parental financial advice titled “Buy High, Sell Low.” In the closing of that post, I mentioned the upcoming resale event in Strongsville that weekend. Well, we attended said event and demonstrated almost immediately our Buy High, Sell Low mantra.

Andrea worked the event while I took the kids to ice skating. While there, she saw a real find: a Barbie Princess Castle. It was a little faded from age, but otherwise was in pristine condition. Retailing at well over $200, she bought it for $50.

After ice skating, I brought the kids to the event, mostly to avail ourselves of leftover bake sale goodies. Andrea showed Chiara her prize. Chiara demonstrated her excitement by almost immediately breaking off one of the clock hands off the tower clock.

Just so I don’t put too fine a point on it, let me re-emphasize. Somehow this other family, with children the same age as ours, had lovingly and carefully maintained this castle doll house in excellent condition for years and we, the Kimmels, couldn’t manage to leave the building without breaking it.

It gets better. We brought the castle home. As I was reassembling the staircase, I broke a piece of the wall off. I super-glued it back on, but it is visibly marred.

In one hour of ownership, we rendered an “excellent” condition toy worth $50 into a “good” condition toy worth $10. We bought the tech stock the day before the market crashed. It was classic Buy High, Sell Low strategy.

There’s an obvious profit opportunity here: short sell the toys that the Kimmel family will buy. Let’s say you know you’ll be in the market for a “good” condition Barbie Castle two years from now. You could buy the castle from the first family, immediately sell it to us for $50 and then buy it back in two years for $10. You’d have your castle (albeit with fewer clock hands and crack-free walls), and you’d have turned a nice $40 profit. 

Buy High, Sell Low

Our parenting financial plan:
Repeat until broke.

I’ve mentioned it in a prior post, but children are really destructive. Attention people without kids – do you like your stuff? Do you have really nice stuff that you are proud of, that’s rare, has sentimental value, or even real market value?

Think long and hard about how much you love your stuff. Kids don’t give a crap about sentimental or material value. They will play with an object just because it looks fun. They might even break it intentionally just to see what the experience is like.

They’re not careful. They’re still developing their motor skills so they can’t even be careful if they want to.  Cody, for example, can’t even be relied on to stand up straight in the same spot without leaning on something or enter a room without banging into a wall or door. And he has a ridiculous amount of kinetic energy. In the absence of toys or activities, Cody will literally jump up and down in place or run in circles, until he bangs into some foreign object.

Cody knocks large, heavy, securely mounted pieces of artwork off the wall which cause all manner of reciprocal damage. So how well do you think he handles a tiny, delicate, antique Japanese porcelain cup? You know exactly how he handles them – and we have now sent several tiny, delicate, antique shards of Japanese porcelain cup to the garbage dump.

Do you think Andrea and I learn from our mistakes? No, we do not. Having outgrown the train table in the playroom, we decided it was time for a craft table instead. So we went and found one – a beautiful one from Pottery Barn Kids, with four beautiful chairs. This whole setup was like $300 (I only put that number so you won’t think we are outrageous snobs; Dear God I hope the price was that low). We put it into the playroom and the kids went to work on that. I have no idea what it is they’ve done to it, but after six months of use its former gorgeous shiny mocha veneer now resembles your grandfather’s workbench.

When you’re a first-time parent, everything just has to be new. No item can have been soiled by the slightest touch of other children who don’t share your cleanliness fetish or moral upbringing. You pay premium prices for the best products. Months or even weeks later, you’ve outgrown the item physically or realized its impracticality. So you take it to the resale event.

There’s a resale event in Strongsville tomorrow, which will be your opportunity to buy formally pristine items at a fraction of the cost. The exchange rate is roughly $100 new equals $5-20 if lightly used. I know for certain that our $300 Pottery Barn would fetch around $50 and we would call it a win.

$300 out, $50 in. Buy high and sell low. That’s our motto.

The 2nd law of parenting

Sir Isaac Newton.
I cannot compete with this guy.

I guess I had some notion that the day-to-day stuff would get easier. We have routines, it’s the same thing every day. You wake up, you get dressed, you brush your teeth, you eat breakfast, you get coats and shoes on and you get in the car and go. That’s, what, maybe 30 minutes of total value-added activity? Perhaps 15 minutes if you are under the gun? If the kids aren’t up already, I wake them at 7:00, and they’re usually up well before that. So we should be out the door at 7:30, right? So why are we sometimes struggling to leave by 8:30?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because, the actual process is: wake the kids up – beg and scream and cajole – get dressed – beg and scream and cajole – eat breakfast – beg and scream and cajole, and so on. Basically, weekday parenting is herding cats. Two cats. But very independent minded and obstinate ones.

We’ve been doing this for over two years, so by my calculations that’s something like 500 attempts at getting out the door and into the car. After 500 goes at this, shouldn’t our reasonably intelligent children understand that, once the shoes and coats are on, the next step is to proceed directly to the car, get in, and get in the booster seat? And yet, opening that door to the garage is akin to unleashing juvenile German shepherds from their travel cage into the room – within seconds, toys and bikes are out, messes made, and coats and clothes are dirty. Do I really have to explain that, no, today is not the one exception day where we can play with sidewalk chalk before going to school?

I have a theory to explain this behavior. The children, it seems, are more bound by the laws of physics than by the more human motives of rationality and process. Newton’s second law of physics is centered on entropy – the general trend from order to chaos. The children, it seems, are contributors to entropy on a grand scale. Observe the process of putting on coats 500 times and you can easily see how my children are marching us ever closer to the heat death of the universe.

That door to the garage isn’t just a portal, it’s a vacuum. We all know that nature hates a vacuum, and as the door opens, you can almost hear the whoosh of young-child mass being sucked in. Getting into the car isn’t a controlled reaction, it’s an implosion, with all the destruction that entails.

Watch any Disney movie, and you’ll learn that love is the strongest force in the world. I can tell you that Andrea and I love our children with great strength indeed. But parenting is no match for Sir Isaac Newton- the universe itself conspires against our parental attempts at order and routine.

Sentimentality

Our box of our kids' keepsakes

When you have kids, it’s easy to be sentimental. Sometimes, sentimentality is all you’ve got- when you’re frazzled and stressed and tired, sometimes you need the shot of joy that for a few fleeting moments make it all seem worth it.

A good summary for “sentimentalist” might be “pack rat.” We have a box in our bureau containing various crafts and artwork, projects from school and other bric-a-brac. This box is now a teetering, overflowing morass, threatening to take over the contents of the rest of the bureau.

The challenge is the sheer volume of materials that two young children can produce on a daily basis. Each day, school sends them home with several items each. Each item needs a review, and the review committee needs to answer the eternal question: “Am I supposed to keep this?” A marked up Letter D writing worksheet with “coby” (“Cody” with a backwards lower-case “d”) ham-fistedly written on the top. Am I supposed to keep that?

I am the force behind the pack-rattedness. I am the sentimentalist. Not knowing what will make us gushy down the road, my bias is to hold on to it. Pretty soon every snotty Kleenex, so long as one of my children wrote “I love you Daddy” on the back, becomes a keepsake worth holding onto. We can always re-evaluate after three months of seasoning and discard in the periodic purge. The trouble is, the purge never comes.

Andrea’s feeling is more aligned with Joseph Stalin’s: “Sentimentality is a sickness of dogs.” (Side note: I seem to quote Stalin a lot more since becoming a parent. What gives?) Andrea takes one glance at the send-home papers and shoves them directly into the trash. More than once this has gotten her in real trouble.

“Where’s my butterfly picture?” asks Chiara.

“I don’t know, did you look in your room?” says Andrea as she furiously digs through the refuse.

“It’s not in here!” Chiara starts to whine.

“I found it!” Andrea exclaims.

“Why is it so wrinkly?”

The kids, of course, angle hard in my direction. Never ask your kids if you should keep something. The answer is obvious. I remember once in summer camp in elementary school we had a “swap meet” where you brought items and sold them to the other kids, then used your profits to buy from others. My sister, probably 5 at the time, spent her little bit of money to buy back the fish guide that we had brought to sell. It was an adult book that she had never spent more than 30 seconds looking at, and I doubt ever looked at it again, but that’s sentimental value for you.

I know, or at least I’m desperately hoping, that there will come a time years hence when I will look back on these times with romantic hindsight. In some sense, I’m planning for it. But I never know which letter D worksheets hindsight will show to be of great value, and which will just be snotty Kleenex.

The King Needs an Heir

Prince William is really falling behind on his
Grand Theft Auto V playing time

A woman walks into a room and asks “do you want to have a baby?”

Here’s what is going through the man’s mind: Yes, of course I want a baby. The King needs an heir. Strapping young boys to take the family name and take over the family fortune, preferably. We’ll shoot guns and ride horses and camp in the forest. The boys will probably play in the NFL. Someday all these things will come to pass, and it will be a wonderful time.

…Wait, did you mean, now? Well, er, um, that gets more complicated. No I wouldn’t say now is a great time. I just got Grand Theft Auto V. And bowling is going very well.

Men want offspring in the theoretical sense. Women want babies in the real sense – like now, today.

The problem with the king and horses imagery is that Kings have servants. They have peasants: chambermaids, nannies, cooks, cleaners, bakers, candle shop makers. In the real life, for real schmucks like ourselves, you’re doing all that stuff yourself. You have to change the baby’s diaper and change your chamber pot as well. You have to dip your own damn candles.

Not that women’s imaginations are any more accurate than men’s. Many times I have spoken to women who thought that their kids would be cute, quiet, sweet and well-behaved. Despite all the images and communications to the contrary, many childless women have this bizarre fantasy where kids are easy and inexpensive. They are easy to teach and impart values on for the right mother. There are no stitches and constipation and croup and pee-pee accidents. Just wonderful bundles of cuddley nom nom.

And, in fact, they are for a while…

I’m convinced it’s a trick they pull to ensure propogation of the species. Around nine months old, babies are just about the cutest and sweetest things you could imagine. You just cannot imagine your great fortune of having such a wonderful, beautiful child as your son or daughter.

So you think to yourself: what could possibly be better than one wonderful, sweet and beautiful child? I know! TWO wonderful, sweet and beautiful children!

You conceive a second, and right around the time they are due, the first child pulls off the mask and demonstrates they were a horrible freaking demon child the whole time. The terrible twos are upon you, and now with a second one in your arms, you will be juggling diapers and breast feeding and naps with a screaming toddler tugging on your pant leg. Plus you’re in the tunnel for a long time - stuck in “terrible” two-three-four phase for almost five years. Just to ensure you never rest, they pull this trick where they take turns in their good and bad phases. The moment one enters a good behavior phase, the other exits. You’re always stressed about one or the other; sometimes both. This happens on almost a week-to-week basis.

This is why I can’t figure out how some parents have a third. I would literally rather cut myself than have a third child. And yet we even know people that are working on their fourth. I can only think “you people are still having kids?!?!?” In our later 30’s, the thought of having another is absolutely crushing. The women you occasionally read about in tabloids having children in their 60’s, or the families with like 12 children… I mean, this is a blog, but I just don’t have the words.

There Will Come Messy Kids

In the Ray Bradbury classic science fiction short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” people of the future live (or lived) in a highly automated house. One image from that story has always stuck with me – the ashes from the cigar that the house automatically lights and then burns down because no one smokes it are automatically swept away by robotic mice that scurry around cleaning up even the tiniest mess. It’s an interesting fantasy and probably a great labor saving device. But we don’t need scurrying robot mice in our home. We have Andrea.

Andrea scurries around behind the rest of our family, cleaning up every tiny mess. Crumbs left from your piece of toast are vacuumed up. Tiny bits of leaf brought in from outside are disposed of. Smudges on the windows or floors or counters are wiped away with Windex. Every item has an assigned place, and anything out of place is quickly returned. She keeps a beautiful house. And it’s infectious – after ten years of marriage, I too am an official clean freak.

It was from Andrea that I learned the meaning of the term “spotless.” In a previous life, it was a theoretical construct, essentially a synonym for “clean.” In an Andrea Kimmel household, the meaning is literal. “Spotless” means “No spots.” Not one spot. If you see a spot, you clean it up. If you see a crumb, you vacuum it up. The mice in Soft Rains are tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, robotic. In our house, we’re tireless, ceaseless, mechanical, neurotic.

(Spolier Alert) The house in Soft Rains is cleaning up the mess after a nuclear holocaust, but Andrea is cleaning up after something much worse – Cody Kimmel. Cody is the opposite of Spotless. Like Spot-ful. Many Spots. Cody simply cannot engage in an activity without making a mess. His favorite meal, grilled cheese, becomes a crumb shower for himself and his surroundings. He’s spilled every drink he’s touched. Every trip to the fridge ends with yogurt on the floor. Every dinner can be transferred to sleeve which can then be transferred to wall.

All that is accidental. It’s the intentional stuff that is particularly infuriating.  Let’s face it, kids- especially boys- just destroy stuff. Do you like your stuff? Don’t have kids. Kids take all your nice, lovely stuff – the stuff you’ve worked hard to obtain, lovingly selected and cared for, collected and cultivated – and they break that stuff. Destroy it. Render your priceless collection into worthless crap. Cody loves nothing more than to kick a hole in the door or scratch a big scratch on a wall. Those smudges that Andrea is furiously scrubbing away? He’s planting big fat new ones on the windows.

And Cody’s very favorite activity, which takes him almost no time at all, is making a giant mess of a room. Cody will dump the contents of a drawer full of toys on the floor and then minutes later, with his short attention span satiated, will move on to another room and another drawer. Andrea or I will take a moment to clean a few breakfast dishes and literally turn to see we have a giant mess in the playroom which needs to be picked up before we head out for the day. You can see the self-perpetuating madness in this – in the time it takes to clean the playroom mess, Cody will have created two more in his bedroom.

The title There Will Come Soft Rains is from the poem the automated house reads to itself as the day winds down. It plays classical music and shows colorful animal images on the nursery wall. The house is quiet, happy, clean (at least until it burns down in holocaust fires). It turns out that it takes an empty house to make a clean house, but until the day the kids go to college or they invent robot cleaning mice, we’ll have to rely on Andrea to keep us spot free.

How Parenting Could Solve the Mideast Crisis

I said one piece of chocolate,
Mr. Khamenei, and that's it!

In between the news organizations’ estimates of “Omaha” counts predicted to come from Peyton Manning this weekend, you may have actually heard some real news – the US is in talks with Iran over their potential creation of nuclear bomb technology. The two sides are locked in deep negotiations. My recommendation for Secretary of State John Kerry? Try Candy. But only at the right time.

All parents know a principle that diplomats use all the time – leverage. Here it is in a nutshell: leverage is when you have an advantage over your negotiating partner. For example:

Russia: “I have a huge army and would like you to buy our oil, what do you think?”

Ukraine: “Oh yes, we certainly agree. Very fair.”

Here’s an example of leverage gone awry:

Dad: “Here, son, have some candy.”

[Child munches on candy]

Dad: “And now, since I was such a generous and loving father, I’m sure you won’t mind cleaning your room in thanks.”

Son: “Screw you, Dad!”

[Child proceeds to damage every piece of furniture in the house with a toy airplane]

Never, ever pass up an opportunity for leverage. This is a standard negotiating tactic: always get something for what you get. “Can I play Wii?” is a brilliant opportunity to extract some value.

Similarly, never give leverage when you don’t have to. Somehow, we seem to forget this lesson all the time. “You promise if I let you order dessert you’ll be good on the car ride home?” is a regular slip. “Oh yes, oh yes” the children promise “would we lie to you?” they say, winking, and you can almost see the twinkle off their gold tooth. 20 minutes later we’re screaming at them in the back seat, reminding them of their promise. Remember, guilt is not leverage. Guilt has no impact on these children.

Instead, if you’re ever in a position of having to act first on the promise of future results, remember a principle important in finance: future value discounting. Remember J. Wellington Wimpy from the Popeye cartoons “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today?” No, no, no. If you buy a sofa today with cash rather than take their “pay later” deal, you should get it for less, right? Same thing with kids. Except, here’s the deal. The discount factor for that couch is probably 15%. The kids discount factor needs to be, like, 1000. So if they promise you good behavior for a day, expect maybe 10 minutes. Factor those 10 minutes into your value calculation for that ice cream they want.

Unfortunately the children have a way of creating leverage out of nothing. It’s called: whining. And they are expert at knowing how to maximize that leverage: whine in public places, loudly. Embarrass your mother in the checkout line, and some portion of the time she might actually buy that candy bar. And god is it tempting to pay off the whining. But this only reinforces the tactic. It emboldens them to whine harder and longer next time and makes it even harder to say no. Don’t let your children know this works. Never negotiate with terrorists.

I’ve written before about the amazing positive impact ofsticker charts in our home. Sticker chart something and the problem goes away almost overnight. And here’s a great thing – the prize they earn at the end of the week can still be held out for more of the behavior you want. “If you want the toy you’ve earned, you have to be good in church.” This is called extortion, and it is an important tool in the parents’ toolkit. “That’s not fair!” the children scream, and they’re right. Ignore the tugs on your conscious. Remember how fair they’ll be the next time you cut a deal.

The children are like rogue actors. They’re not rich and powerful on the household stage, so they have to use a more creative tool set to forward their agenda. And they know you are a diminished version of your former self. Sure, you have the nuclear arsenal, but you are never going to use it. You’re never going to win if this thing goes to protracted land war, but if you artfully use the tools outlined above, you can at least steer the family to a relatively stable détente.