If we want any money we'll have to make it ourselves. Here's our money kit and instructions for getting started.
A page of money blanks like this is provided
for printing out. Give your currency a name -- Mike Dollars, Sun
Dollars, Jelly Beans -- and a signature. You can write an amount
-- one, five, twenty-two -- and if you don't put a number down,
it's a one.
Take a page of Kids' Currency blanks and make some copies. Pay
extra and do a few sheets on colored paper. Yes, it takes money
to make money. Cut them up and they look like this:
Give it a name, maybe your own. That's what Sloppy Joe did. Name
and signature in one. We call them Sloppy Joes.
TRACY
drew a sun on her money. She calls them Sun Dollars. 
JAMES
has made an ad for his comics exchange. 
Can we buy comics with it?
SARAH
just carries a notebook and makes her money on the spot and tears
it off. 
Nice sound effect!
Everybody's money is worth a dollar, even if it is called something else. Then there's the official currency of the teacher or leader. We can call this "house currency." It's worth a dollar too, and it's backed up with rewards. We earn house currency for learning stuff or doing things.
But we don't have to spend our house currency. We can spend our own currency instead, if we've got house currency to back it up. Then our own money is just as good as the official money.
By creating our own money instead of returning the house currency we are doubly rich: We have money to spend and money to keep. What a deal!
Order your master sheet of six black and white originals and pay for it with your own money!
Also available: LEAF, RIBBON, ROPE, RAINY, POLKADOT, SCROLLS, STARS, WOOD, COUPON and more.
Have your name and message printed, plus a logo or graphic of your choice.
Your money's first value is self-expression. Your money is an ad for you. You can write slogans, change the money every day, create new designs. Make your money beautiful. Then people will want it.
Put your message on the back, with your phone number. Give it away. Make connections. Your money is working for you already!
Money was made for games. We can play with our own money and take our winnings home. But don't blow billions. Our money's worth a dollar, remember. The starting stake in Monopoly ®is $1500 and we make $200 more every time we pass GO. So we'd better play for mils. That means $1000 Monopoly money equals one of our dollars.
We're all making dollars, even if we call them something else. That way everybody knows what they're worth, and everybody's currency counts the same. This sacred principle of equality gives every kid a chance, and sure simplifies the math.
In Monopoly and other money games the other players have to accept our money, but this may not be true elsewhere. Let's look at trading:
One of the first things we can do with kids' currency is trade
it: swap money with other kids. We want them to see how cool our
money is, and we build up a collection of other kids' currency.
Then we compare collections and -- Ooh! Can I get one of those?
-- some currencies are more collectable than others.
Making money is more than paper and ink. It's magic. It's the meaning we put into the money, the values we base it on. It's the confidence that every dollar we make will be worth a dollar, or even more, instead of ending up in the trash.
Just making our own money is magic. It declares our independence. Why slave for other people's money? We have the right to create our own currency and our own economy, based on our own values.
And what values are they? Oops, we'd better have some. Of course we do, even if it's ice cream. We can put an ice cream cone on our money. We can put love, peace, wealth, adventure or Save the Planet on our money. We can put sports or entertainment figures on our money, or favorite places or animals. When we trade our money we connect with people with similar interests, and our values get reinforced -- Oh, there are others who feel the way I do.
When we collect money it will be full of meaning, representing values we support or share, and people we relate to. We won't throw this money in the trash. We'll treasure it and try to add to our collection.
If our money is based on our values, there's no upper limit. We can keep discovering higher values. We can overtake the dollar and keep on going.
In the kids' economy, some things get turned around. Since you make your own money, you start out with not zero but infinity. You're infinitely rich. But you aren't rich until you spend it. If you spent nothing you'd get nothing, and be infinitely poor.
The more people want, the more they can spend. So the poorest people from the old economy are the richest in the kids' economy.
Wants are wealth. We put a price tag on them and put them out as investments, since they may not pay off for a while. But they're wealth in the kids' economy, instant capital pumping up the economy.
We would like lots of things to do with our money, but it takes time to build the kids' economy. What can we do right away?
Besides "Wants are Wealth," we can write down things to sell or trade, and things we can do for people. We put prices on them and circulate them. We can contribute ideas, projects, writing, artwork. We can have an economy of information as well as other stuff, and just about anything can go in.
Then we get the list offered by the teacher or leader, and we get the lists offered by the other kids. We end up with a catalog of choices. These include jobs, rewards, currency supplies, projects, stories, people, and things to do with Kids' Currency.
With every catalog there's an order form, or choice chart, with instructions. We'll choose with our money or our votes. Some choices will be yes-no. Most will let us show how much we like them, giving them a score out of five or nine or ten. Some will call for our money, either to spend or to invest.
Investing is a way to start a project or a business in the kids' economy. When enough kids have invested in a project it goes ahead, and they contribute their share in work, resources or money.
We've mentioned values--putting our values behind our currency--and being popular and having good-looking currency. Here are some rules and practices to follow to make our money good:
That should make our money good among people who know us. But it's still worthless outside that circle. We can measure how good our money is by how far it goes.
The way to make kids' currency good is to return any that isn't good. Collecting and trading kids' currency soon shows who's been making too much money. Everybody has too much of it and won't take those currencies in trade anymore.
We can take that worthless stuff back to the person who made it, if we can find her. She has a chance to make her money good, by taking it in trade for whatever other kids' currency she can offer. If she runs out of money, she's bankrupt and her money's no good. Then she's reduced to playing with other people's money, and not being able to make any herself, which is the same wretched fate that adults currently suffer under in real life.
Kids' currency is easy to learn because it's paper that we can see and count and pass around. It's good advertising when we give it away as a kind of thank-you note to people we like. But paper only goes so far.
Paper doesn't go through the telephone. You call Jody with a question and she answers it and you have a good chat and you want to give her one of your beautifully printed Roses. So you have to owe it to her. You jot that down on a phone memo: "One Rose to Jody."
The phone could play a big part in expanding the kids' economy. If we want to get into it we'll have to keep a book. It's actually easier than making money. We just have a page for each person and add in each new credit we give them. We don't have to make money and deliver it.
Then our wealth in kids' currency is the cash we hold plus the credit we have in other people's books.
Book credit is like money in the bank. We can go to the person and ask to take it out in currency. Or we can call and ask her to transfer so much credit to someone else. She just subtracts so much from one page and adds it on the other person's page. We can write checks to do the same thing.
If people see we're in trouble, they might give us more credit. That's when we find out who our friends are. And we realize that credit is more than what's written in any book.
That extra credit lives in the heart. It's whatever our family members and friends are worth to us, maybe a little, maybe a lot. Here's the hidden wealth of the kids' economy.
The paper currency can't express that wealth. We're limited by the Rule of Three and the Law of Return. But keeping a book shifts things radically. Credit knows no limit. Even the book cannot hold it.