Family Finance Lessons: Celia Rivenbark grows up
The most important lessons we learn about money don’t come from our accountants or our radios. They come from our family.
Each week, we invite someone to tell us about the money tips they inherited from the people they grew up with.
This week our guest is Celia Rivenbark. She’s a humor columnist and the author of Rude Bitches Make Me Tired: Slightly Profane and Entirely Logical Answers to Modern Etiquette Dilemas. It’s her seventh book.
Rivenbark says she grew up in the country. “My dad would grow everything we ate and then my mom would freeze and can everything,” says Rivenbark.
Her mother would hold weekly yard sales and her father would glue together his old dentures in favor of replacing them. Rivenbark says her father remained thrifty for his entire life.
She says her father spent the final weeks of his life in a nursing home. One day, an admnistrator came to his room and spoke with Rivenbark while they thought her father was sleeping. “[The administrator] explained how his room had been paid for 100% but [in] one more day we would have to start kicking in,” says Rivenbark.
“He died that night,” she says. “And there is not one doubt in my mind, I can picture him saying ‘Oh no, no no, this money is for my family.’ That’s just the way he was.”
“I sometimes think how unfair it is that my daddy taught special education for 25 years and never made what I make just writing fart jokes for a living. He had a noble career. Me? Not so much. But he would’ve loved the money.”
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