When I was a little girl I used to read the "KidsPost," a regular part of the Washington Post newspaper. It was something I looked forward to every Sunday and couldn't wait to read. The KidsPost featured stories, tips, and ideas for kids.

There was one story in that paper that I will always remember. It was about a 16-year-old girl who got her first car because her father had saved up pennies over the years from the time she was born. When the girl reached age 16, her father purchased a car from the pennies he had saved. The moral of the story was that a little can really add up if you continue to save regularly.

This memory stayed with me over the years, reminding me to recognize the value of money, regardless of how small the amount. That's why I have always saved my pennies. I remember rolling pennies and placing them in wrappers with my grandmother when I was small. I knew my pennies were adding up and that if I continued, I could use my savings to buy something I really wanted.

I don't know how much I have accumulated over the years, but my goal is to continue saving pennies and to pass this tradition along to my kids.

Fast forward to my early adulthood and the time I started my first real job. My dad strongly encouraged me to open an IRA and contribute $25 each month. I thought, "Why should I start saving for retirement now?" I wasn't making a lot of money and retirement was a long way off. But, just like the pennies, I am so glad my dad pushed me to save small amounts of money regularly.

I have continued to save for retirement since then and am glad because time flies and I have made real progress toward my retirement savings goals. As my salary has increased, I've kept up these good savings habits and allocated more for retirement each month.

I think it is important to teach your children about saving and the value of money like my parents did. Oftentimes, lessons learned when we are children will stay with us into adulthood and then will be passed on to our children and to future generations. I will definitely encourage my children to embrace this savings tradition.

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I was the only 19-year-old I knew with an IRA.

I was no financial wunderkind; I grew up with standard, middle-class financial skills. My parents gave me an allowance, which I saved up when I wanted something. They provided me with a comfortable childhood that was by no means luxurious, but never lacked for the necessities. I had no idea how my family's financial system actually worked. I just knew Dad had a job that paid for whatever we needed.

As our careers and incomes (and family) grew, we stopped paying close attention to the budget. We bought a house and we did all the responsible stuff such as buying life and disability insurance. But beyond that, we put our financial life on autopilot.

So what's the problem? We're not dealing with a crisis such as a foreclosure or a layoff, so little has changed. What has changed is the handle we have on our financial big picture. We've grown lazy about tracking our spending and savings. We've focused on the daily bustle of family life for so long that we haven't paused to look at our long-term goals. When our income and expenses were simple, our goals were obvious: pay our bills, save for a vacation and a rainy day, and put the rest in the IRA. But now that we have more money, we have less time to work with it, and the picture is a lot more complicated. Estate planning. Investment. College savings. Taxes. And retirement, which is now a lot closer than it was when I was a wide-eyed college student.

The economy has motivated me to start tracking our spending again. The little IRA I started over 20 years ago has taken a hit from the economy, but I continue to make contributions to it. With the help of a financial planner, the big picture is once again in view. I'm filled with a sense of calm I haven't felt in some time.

Our oldest child is almost a teenager. He's closer to the age I was when I opened my first IRA than I am! I guess that means it's time to grow up again and get back to my simple financial roots. Despite more money, more years, and more responsibilities, my financial roots haven't changed a bit.

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My little brother unwittingly taught me about the power of money.

Together, we'd raid the clothes dryer. We'd scavenge between the sofa cushions. For all appearances, we were equally desperate for the almighty quarter.

He proved me wrong.

I shook my head and told him it was heel to toe or nothing.

The point is, he did it. For a dime. A measly dime.

I, on the other hand, had my sights set on more ambitious ventures. I walked dogs. I manned the proverbial lemonade booth. I babysat and I pulled weeds. For a few weeks one summer, I was employed as a supermarket sample girl. I'd scoop ice cream into small cups for a few bucks an hour, serving sweaty customers in bathing suits on their way to the lake.

The boldest and undoubtedly most successful of my efforts, however, was my foray into the world of fashion. It was the 70s. I was eight-years-old. And I earned secret money by cutting out photos of scantily clad women from the pages of my mother's Cosmopolitan magazines and selling them to the boys at school for a dollar each. My office? The boy's bathroom. I had 'em lining up out the door. It was quite a lucrative gig until the principal found out and called my mother.

Needless to say, she did not appreciate my entrepreneurial efforts.

I, however, learned a valuable lesson about supply and demand -- one I've carried with me and applied many times over as an adult.

Now, my four-year-old daughter is following by example, and applying the very same lessons. As the child of a single parent working full-time, she's learning the value of hard work. Most importantly, she understands that money is never simply handed to you and that it must be earned.

What she does to earn it, well, that's up to her. So far, she's refused to lick my shoe.

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Growing up during the Great Depression forced me to learn the value of a dollar and a penny.

As a boy, I was lucky to find work folding and tying boxes at a local Baltimore factory. I earned 12.5 cents per hour but because money was so tight, I gave all the money to my parents. Saving just wasn't an option when we needed to put food on the table. Despite my long hours at work, I eventually became the first person in my family to graduate from high school.

Then, would you believe it, I won the lottery.

That's right. On a beautiful day in 1979, six Maryland State Lottery balls bounced, rolled and settled, matching the numbers on my ticket. Just like that, I was $3.6 million richer. And I chose the annuity option.

With my winnings, I distributed yearly deposits into the retirement accounts of my six children, invested, and traveled the world. I can say that my financial fortune has given me a wonderful lifetime of experiences that I wouldn't have had otherwise. And I'm also proud to say that my children have found equal success.

I talked to my kids a lot about saving. I stayed tough, and I kept them on course. It gave them a good financial foundation.

Even if we hadn't won the lottery, we would have had enough. It was a smart decision to take out the annuity, though, when we did win. That way, we didn't spend through all of our money and lose it. We put money into the kids' IRAs, put money away for ourselves.

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Money confused me as a kid. I knew I wanted stuff, and that money got it for me, but I didn't get where the money came from. Maybe a tree? Or a magic hat? Either way, I realized my dad had a job and always drove a Cadillac, so I figured we must be all right.

From the time I was very young, I recalled hearing my mom lament, "We don't have money," or "We can't afford it," but I didn't know what that meant either. How could we not have money? We eat, don't we? We get presents for Christmas, we have a house, so what gives?

The most striking mental image I have from childhood is the memory of my mom sitting at her roll top desk, sighing and writing checks for bills. And although I saw her worry about family finances, I often fought with my mom about money. I wanted the clothes and the trips and my own car, but it was always the same: "We don't have the money." And each time I heard that familiar line, I grew more confused. After all, I never once heard my dad say we couldn't afford it.

It came down to the wire when I was a teen-ager. I'd insisted on going to the same private school as my friends and after an epic battle, my dad agreed. And then my junior year, I wanted a class ring. "No." My mom told me. "Absolutely not. We can't afford it." My dad wobbled. He hated to deny his kids anything. In the end, I knew I'd won when my mom fought back tears. I got my ring.

Soon enough, I lost the ring, and years later, after my mom had passed away, my dad told me that the day after my mom wrote the check for my class ring, my parents had 82 cents left in their checking account. Eighty-two cents. For a family of six.

Spoiled as I was, I hope that had I known how little money my parents had, I wouldn't have insisted on the ring. Perhaps had I seen in dollars and cents what "we can't afford it" meant, I would have understood that my parents really couldn't buy the ring.

I grew up with two different role models - one spent when he didn't have the money, and one conserved to the extreme. I wish I had taken the time to ask my parents for details -- to see the numbers, to show me what they had in the bank. If the concept of money earned, money spent, money saved lived in black and white, I may have learned better money management.

Now that I'm a parent, I hear my five-year-old daughter asking as I did for an "airplane" trip or a dinner out, and I hear myself saying, "We can't afford it," without giving context. So with my husband on board, I've been working to help her develop a practical sense of money by explaining that there is a certain amount of money we have coming in and there are expenses going out. The easiest way for me to show her this at her age is through pennies given and taken, which replaces the vague "we don't have any money" with coins that show this more clearly.

I don't know if it will work or not. What I do know is that my 72-year-old dad just declared bankruptcy and I miss my mom sighing at that roll top desk.

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Growing up rich has a lot of advantages.

Or so I'm told. I wouldn't know. I grew up in Kansas. In a middle-class family of six. What I didn't realize then is if you played your cards right, you could be rich. It just took a lot of discipline and really good coupons.

My dad was King of Saving. He never saw a sale price he couldn't beat. And as a Wal-Mart manager, he knew the prices. He studied the flyers from all the competing stores religiously. The Sunday paper was his Bible.

Mom drank Diet Coke ...except when Diet Pepsi was on sale.

Dad also taught that just because something was full price didn't mean you should pay full price: "Only idiots do that." You could always find it for cheaper. Sometimes that meant opting for the generic vs. the brand name: "I'm not paying $5 extra just for a name." Other times, especially with clothes, it meant waiting until the end of the season markdowns. Or hitting garage sales on Saturday. (Craigslist hadn't appeared yet.)

After all, would you really wear Nikes to mow the lawn?

Without doubt, though, Dad's biggest claim to fame was his ability to quote any price for less than you could find it yourself. Dad turned it into a game: "Take a guess at how much these shoes cost. Then take a guess what I paid for them." The answer was always mind-blowing: "Five bucks!!...And they're brand new shoes!"

Mom started calling him Pricetag Papa, saying he had a price for everything.

"Can I get a ride to soccer practice?"

"Do you have five bucks?"

Dad's energy was contagious. Soon we were all doing it.

Occasionally, we'd jump in the station wagon and celebrate our savings with 99 cent Wendy's Frostys.

All of this is extremely valuable now as recently I've started my own family. Both my wife and I are from frugal backgrounds and agree just how important it is to teach our daughter the value of saving, especially in these financially uncertain times.

Leading by example, my dad has provided an excellent message to help raise my daughter smartly.

Again, he shows that what it really comes down to is attitude.

Many people believe that by saving, they have to give something up. This is the wrong attitude. No, by saving you are investing in your future.

My dad is doing very well right now.

I plan to follow in his path. And take my daughter with me.

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From early on, my parents taught me to earn money I had to work for it. I quickly learned that working smart paid more than working hard.

Our chore chart hung on the fridge. And each chore had a corresponding pay rate. Vacuuming was good for 70 cents. Collecting the garbage was good for 10 cents. Dusting was good for 15 cents. It didn't take me long to figure out that if I was a job hog, I could clear about $5 a week.

During college, I was also fortunate to be able to spend a summer volunteering at an orphanage in Egypt. Surrounded by real poverty for the first time, I considered the value of money in a new way. Suddenly my full closet back home seemed excessive. Did I need five pairs of pajamas and twenty pairs of shoes? I'd burned through hundreds of dollars on trendy clothes, cassette tapes and cheeseburgers. While overseas I learned to substitute and do without. Surprisingly, I didn't miss what I didn't have.

After returning to college, however, it only took a semester until I was back to indulging in designer jeans, pizza delivery and the downtown bars. My dad eventually had to explain how a budget works: account for what you need each month and everything else is want.

Today I want my three sons' joy to come from what they do, not what they acquire. The boys responded to my good intentions with whining and tantrums until I showed them my budget last winter. Beginning with my monthly household allowance, I wrote our expenses on a yellow legal pad. I asked my oldest which category these expenses fell into: Want or Need. He immediately recognized the distinction between groceries and guitar lessons. Seeing how each item added up to a grand total was the real revelation. Now we'll be driving home in the minivan and my son will ask me, "Mom? Do you have enough in your budget so that we can go out to eat tonight? Or do we have to wait until next month?" I'd say compared to me at his age, my boy is ahead of the curve when it comes to learning how to spend within his means.

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I first experienced the reward of a hard day's work when I was a child growing up in Louisiana. For a week each fall, five or six of us kids would rake leaves and pick up pecans for my aunt. With our pay, we'd go to a movie and buy popcorn and candy.

to me about saving, so I didn't think much about it.

It was when I joined the U.S. Army that I learned the value of saving. I had a wife and we wanted to start a family. The Army provided everything I needed, which meant I had money left over. I saved every penny I made, putting it into the Soldiers and Sailors Deposit Account because it had a 10 percent guaranteed return.

Years later, my wife and I tried to teach our son these important lessons. He always wanted the biggest and most expensive of everything and we wouldn't buy it for him. We thought it was important for him to learn how to do without.

Although now, after watching my son struggling financially and purchasing luxury items he didn't have as a child, I wish that I'd done more to prepare him.

My advice to parents today: Teach them. Talk to your kids about what money is so they don't make the same mistakes. I lost money and learned the hard way. If we can teach them early, maybe they won't make the same mistakes.

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Far from glamorous, my first paying job was also far from the traditional first jobs of mowing lawns, babysitting, or paper routes.

Instead, I helped salvage scrap aluminum.

It was dirty work, as well as tedious and boring, but the pay wasn't bad. At 15 or 20 cents per pound, we could make a decent day out of it if we worked hard. In the late 1970s, at our ages, bringing in $15 to $25 for a day's work seemed like a pretty good deal.

Even so, we didn't get to keep much of what we made. Around the same time we started working at the foundry, my stepmother put us on a debt repayment system, where the money spent on us for everything from clothes to shampoo was deducted from our earnings. My sister and I had to maintain a list of our debts in a notebook, and when we had paid off an item, we could cross it off the list. The list was endless, and we weren't free of it until we left home.

But I did learn one important thing: how to work. I quickly figured out that the faster I worked, the heavier my day's haul of scrap aluminum, the more I earned.

That work ethic served me well when I went away to college. Loans and grants didn't cover my tuition and living expenses, so I worked two jobs to make ends meet. Sure, a safety net would have been nice. But when you don't have it, you learn not to depend on it.

Which is not to say that I didn't make mistakes, from mild to rather spectacular. My first checking account was a mess. The bank shared that opinion, clearly, since they closed my account at some point during my freshman year. That was my first hard, adult lesson about managing money and what could happen if I didn't.

It's a tricky thing now, teaching my own children about money when my own experience with it at their age was so punitive. I try to be matter-of-fact with them about money. When we can't afford something, I try to let them know without attaching emotion to it. Before they leave home, I want them to understand how to manage a checking account and, I hope, how to save money.

I want them to go out into the world feeling more confident then I did about their money skills and their ability to take care of themselves.

There's a lot to teach, and a lot for them to learn. And I'm still learning right along with them.

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While most families talk about school and the weather around the dinner table, my family talked about payroll and budgeting. My parents were owners of a small industrial water treatment business, and so my brother and I were often called on to help discuss and solve business problems. These discussions had a tremendous impact on my eventual dealings with money. Seeing the way my parents had to work and live frugally to ensure they could always make payroll, I learned early the importance of building up savings. You never knew when you might need it. Even from my first jobs mowing lawns and babysitting, I funneled all of my profits into a checking account. It made me feel safe and protected. It also gave me independence. When my favorite teacher invited me to see an Elton John concert when I was in the sixth-grade, I knew I had to ask my parents for permission, but not money. I had enough of my own to pay for a ticket.

Later, when I was studying abroad in England, I found work with a local family to make spending money so my savings could continue to grow.

The foundations of saving and thrift have lasted with me to this day. Because my childhood experience was so instrumental to my healthy financial development, I try to instill the same lessons in my two sons. We had them open up savings accounts early, so they could learn the responsibility of putting money away. While not wanting to overwhelm them, we discuss money on a regular basis. Recently, when my son asked to go on a trip to Alaska with his classmates, I saw it as an opportunity to teach him the importance of setting goals. We set a number on a big blackboard in the kitchen, and as he put his earnings into his savings account, he could see how close he was to achieving his goal. With any luck, both of my sons will take these lessons with them through life like I did.

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It's amazing what you'll put up with for money in high school.

I was terrified about getting a job back then. I had a pretty sweet deal living off my parents rummaging around in the cupboards for food, cruising around town with my buddies in a beat-up Buick Skylark, and limiting my responsibilities to homework and mowing lawns. And work is? well, it's work! Why not put if off as long as possible?

One day I walked into the local grocery store with my best friend. He worked there as a janitor and needed to talk to his boss about some time off. She was in the middle of some minor catastrophe ('Clean up on aisle 4!') and was practically begging him to come in early that night and help out. He couldn't, but standing there in front of rows of Cap'n Crunch and Honey Nut Cheerios I saw an opening.

"Hey, I'm looking for a job. Maybe I could help," I said.

It took her less than a second to respond. And thus began my long and colorful stint as a janitor. There's nothing glamorous about keeping a grocery store clean. I wore a red and blue striped uniform. I smelled of 409 and Janitor-in-a-Drum. My pants were stained with dumpster-juice, and I discovered dozens of green, slimy new life-forms beneath the produce cases. I waxed floors, mopped bathrooms, and scraped grease off the doughnut maker (which, for the record, will make you reconsider eating donuts again.) I made $3.25 per hour and my first paycheck totaled about $70, but to me it felt like I'd just lifted the lid on a chest full of pirate booty. I ran down to the manager's booth and promptly cashed the check. I was giddy with the wad of bills in my pocket. I knew this was the first investment in my future's delicious whiff of my earning potential. Within an hour I'd blown it all on comic books and a Super Big Gulp.

Two weeks later, I got my next paycheck. It was bigger, having worked a full two weeks. And I was committed to spending my money more prudently this time. It only lasted about a week. But I soon had some new Ocean Pacific t-shirts and Appetite for Destruction playing in my cassette deck, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself.

As cool as all of this stuff was, my excitement didn't last. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I bought all this stuff, but I realized that I was just keeping up with my friends instead of getting ahead. I couldn't keep spending my paycheck every week. I had to save.

And so I did. I went to the local bank and opened a checking account. Every week I'd keep $20 for myself, and put the rest in the account. There weren't as many ATMs back then, so I'd peruse my statements every month to track my progress. As I saved more, I could imagine more things I could afford, knowing that my money was in a safe place kept me disciplined. I'd only get money out for things I needed. The rest just kept adding up. And I knew that it wouldn't be long before I could afford the things I was saving for.

My advice? Don't feel bad about treating yourself to something cool every once in a while, but do it with a plan. Save your money, put it in an account and think of it as an investment in something even better in the future. Maybe you know what that is, maybe you don't. But you'll be much happier just knowing it could be yours.

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