Hard Work and Money Management-Keys to Success

Up until the last few hundred years, families spent a lot of time working together to build a life. Farming was the typical lifestyle, so the dad and sons would work out in the field planting crops and taking care of animals, while the mom and daughters worked inside the house doing laundry and preparing meals. Then the industrial revolution came. Men would go off to work in factories, so a lot more responsibility fell on the women of the house. It did not help that often times children went off to work in factories as well, so there were even less hands to help around the house.

Nowadays, children do not work in factories, but they tend not to help out a whole lot around the house. However, this was not the case in my family. In my house we all have chores. We have to clean our room, make our bed, bring down our laundry, tidy our bathroom, and clean up our areas around the house everyday. We have kitchen jobs that rotate every week. So one week you unload, the next you load, then you vacuum, the week after that you set the table, and finally you clear the table. In addition to these jobs, every day you have another area of the house to clean; from vacuuming a room, to cleaning a bathroom.

Even with all of these jobs, we never got paid. My parents called it "free on the job training". They said that they were teaching us to work hard so that way we would be good employees when we grew up and got part-time and full-time jobs. That is exactly what happened. I started working at Panera Bread three-and-a-half years ago, and I got my two younger two brothers a job there as well. There is now a standard at Panera that "The Snows" know how to work. Before the younger of my two brothers started working there, my bosses kept asking me when he would be old enough to start working so that way they could have another great worker. Then, when I asked how he was doing, my boss said "you can tell he is a Snow".

My parents did not buy us a lot of "extra" things. We did not go out to eat a lot, we got toys on Christmas, and we did not have fancy clothes.They provided what we needed, but not always what we wanted. And I could not be more grateful for that. This lead to us working hard to find ways to make money so that way we could go out and buy fun "stuff" for ourselves.

Not only that but it taught us to be frugal with our money. They taught us to give 10% of our income to tithing, put 40% in savings, and 50% in spending. This has made paying tithing and saving money easy since I have done it all of my life. Since I knew how to be frugal with my money it was very easy for me to make a budget in my money management class a year ago, that I still use on a regular basis today.

I am so grateful that my parents taught me everything that they did about the importance of hard work and money management. If it was not for them, I would not be on my fifth semester of college, with a car and a credit card, completely debt free. I am so blessed that they taught me everything that they did, and I hope that I can pass that knowledge on to my own children.