Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping by and Get Your Financial Life Together by Erin Lowry

Chapter 1
Money Isn’t the Worst! Seriously.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1996, a glazed Krispy Kreme donut changed my life. Well,
okay, not just one donut: five dozen Krispy Kreme donuts.
It all began on a humid morning in North Carolina when my mom
decided to engage in one of the most dangerous and cutthroat suburban
activities: hosting a yard sale.
As my sister and I watched her spend the week leading up to it preparing
to sell off our unused goods to flocks of women wearing elastic-band
sweatpants and scrunchies (this was the nineties, after all), an idea began to
germinate in my seven-year-old mind. If people were willing to hand over
their hard-earned cash for a used Abs of Steel video at 7:30 in the morning,
wouldn’t they be likely to fork some over to buy donuts from two adorable
children?
Suddenly, visions of Toys“R”Us store aisles—and, more specifically, a
Nerf Super Soaker I’d been coveting—started to dance in my head.
I pitched the idea to my parents. After a little deliberation, my dad
offered to be my backer and stake the capital required to fund my enterprise
—as well as drive the car to pick up the donuts. (Again, I was seven.)
My four-year-old sister, Cailin (no, this is not a typo—that’s her real
name), and I set up shop using our Fisher-Price picnic table as our
storefront. I strapped a teal fanny pack around my waist to hold my
earnings, donned my purple baseball cap, and we were open for business.
Cailin and I spent the morning of the yard sale calling out to haggardlooking

shoppers, neighbors walking their dogs, and gaggles of neon-tracksuited moms.

We implored them to purchase a glazed Krispy Kreme donut

for the inflated price of 50 cents. And slowly but surely, the combination of
my sister’s doe-like eyes and my enthusiastic sales pitch won them over.
Handing over those donuts to die-hard garage sale enthusiasts and kind
neighbors felt like grueling work during an early morning of summer
vacation. Finally, with the last donut sold, I peeked into my fanny pack
knowing the Super Soaker was mine. Feeling the weight of all those
quarters, I imagined I could even buy two Super Soakers and be the
ultimate warrior of water fights at the pool.
Then everything went horribly wrong.
My dad strolled over and asked to see the earnings. After having been
subjected to seven years of his tyrannical “candy tax” at Halloween (he
claimed first dibs on our loot because he chaperoned the trick-or-treating,
which set me up nicely to understand taxes in my first real-world
paycheck), I clutched the fanny pack to my chest, refusing to show him.
My dad took the fanny pack, dumped our earnings on our picnic table,
and carefully counted out the coins. He then proceeded to give me my first
lesson in economics.
“You have thirty dollars here,” he said.
“Yes,” I confidently replied. “I am going to Toys“R”Us.”
He looked at me and smiled in that all-knowing way parents do, which
left me with a sense of foreboding brewing in the pit of my stomach.
“Well, it cost me eight dollars to buy the donuts you sold,” he said while
he picked up eight dollars in quarters.* “Then you had Cailin help you sell
them, so you need to pay her.” He handed my four-year-old sister six
dollars. “So, after expenses, your net profit was sixteen dollars.” He smiled
while pushing the remaining piles of quarters toward me.
I had never felt so cheated in my life.
•   •   •
RATHER THAN CONVINCING ME that my dad was out to swindle us, the Krispy
Kreme experience instead has become the cornerstone of my personal
finance education. What my dad’s lesson started was a long tradition of my
parents teaching us essential lessons about money through the use of reallife

examples, which are still fresh in my mind 20 years later.

Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping by and Get Your Financial Life Together by Erin Lowry