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Author Insight
Are We Losing Control with Digital Pay
I am not a digital native. What I am is a bumbling digital grandma who has only recently started to share my cell phone number with people outside of my family. I have been highly suspicious of using that phone for any financial business. When I won a drawing and the prize was a gift card I received by email, I was in new territory. The instructions were to load it into Apple Pay—an app I knew about but didn’t understand--on my phone. I followed the instructions. Several months later I remembered it at a time when I could use it. We were out to lunch, and I opened it. I told the waiter I had it but did not know what to do next. He took my phone, looked at it, touched it to his machine nodded and handed it back. After I entered the tip, I asked what to do next. He said, “That’s all, you’re done.” It felt more like waving a magic wand than spending money. If it is this easy for many people to spend money, I wonder if it’s easier to lose track of how much is spent. Does it make it easier to spend more than you intend to? Or am I just way behind the times? What do you think? What is money anyway? If it’s not bills and coins, is it just pixels? Embrace Prosperity describes how others have answered this question and so much more.
Book Excerpt
Embrace Prosperity
The Mystery of Money
Do you remember how you learned about money? Were you given coins as a child? Was money a toy or a tool? Did you hear grownups talking about it with worried voices? Were you instructed in “the value of money?”
Deliberate Confusion
Laurie: As a 10-year-old, I remember watching the grownups at an extended family gathering confuse my 2-year-old brother about money with a coin exchange game. They used US coins: a copper penny is larger than a silver colored dime that is worth 10 pennies. A silver colored nickel, worth 5 pennies, is larger than a penny.
The grownups knew the relative values of the coins. The 2-year-old was much more interested in the size, color and quantity of the coins. He was quite happy to be the center of attention and play the exchange game with them.
Someone offered him a dime, which he happily accepted. Then someone else offered to exchange the dime for a larger, but less valuable nickel. He liked the bigger coin and took it, and everyone laughed at a joke he did not understand.
Then someone else offered to exchange two coins, pennies, that had still less value for the nickel. Again, he happily accepted the new coins and the grownups laughed uproariously. This time he seemed confused by the laughter.
I am not sure if this event had any particular impact on him, but I know he struggled with managing money throughout most of his life.
Clear Guidelines
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