We’ve all played Monopoly with its instantly recognisable fake money.
It’s fun to throw $500 notes around and pay rents of $1,000 and buy everything we land on. But what if it was real money. Well researcher Adam Carroll did exactly that. He withdrew $10,000 in real notes and gave it to his kids to play monopoly with.
What happened? The kids gave a lot more thought to what they bought, which properties they put houses on and each transaction they made in general.
Carroll concluded that, “Kids today are being raised in a world where money is no longer real. It is an illusion but it has very real consequences.”
Getting credit is too easy and wanting the $700,000 house and not the affordable $500,000 home is how many young ones look at life now.
Payments are now mostly made through EFTPOS, credit cards, Paypal and other electronic methods. Only 4% of money used for transactions today is in coin or notes, so it’s not real.
Dunn and Bradstreet found that “people spend 12-18% more when using credit cards instead of cash.” Educating our kids on how to earn, spend and the true value of money is critical to not having them end up debt-ridden for years.
Go to Youtube.com and search for “When money isn’t real: the $10,000 experiment. Adam Carroll” to watch the full video on the Monopoly experiment using real money. It’s quite a sobering exercise.
All quotes and facts presented in this article are taken from the Youtube video.