The 10-Year Old Accountant, Pt. 1

August 21, 2008

“You actually LIKE taxes?” “How can you do that? I just couldn’t sit there crunching numbers all day.” “Ugh! I always hated math!”

Those are comments I’ve heard throughout the years. “What made you choose accounting?” is another one I’ve heard, usually on job interviews. The quick answer is that I always loved math and have a personal relationship with numbers. But there’s a much longer story to tell, about how I got to be a 40-something CPA with the State Insurance Fund.

My career was not begun on the traditional route. I didn’t go to college immediately after high school; I didn’t get my accounting degree at age 22 or 23 and immediately go to work for one of the “Big 4” accounting firms (or Big 8, or Big 6, depending on the what year it was and who merged with who). In fact I was 23 before I even decided on a career in Accounting; 33 when I completed a 4-year degree; was pushing 40 when I passed the CPA exam.

But the roots of my career choice start at a much, much younger age.

I was an accountant when I was 10 years old; I just didn’t realize it! My family would go grocery shopping every Thursday. Like clockwork. I believe that stemmed from when my dad would get paid from his job once a week; he’d get paid on Thursday so that’s when he’d take my mom to get groceries. She didn’t drive; never learned. So every Thursday for as far back as I can remember, we’d all hop in the station wagon and journey out to the Quality Buy in Tunnel Hill to pick up our weekly groceries.

We kids didn’t get a regular allowance but each Thursday at the grocery store my dad give each of us a dime, a quarter, or a dollar, depending on our age. Remember that this was the 1970s! A dime would buy us a coke or candy bar or bubble gum or ice cream (my favorite was the orange push-ups). I can still see us in the back seat, stretching our arms to our dad in the front seat, hands cupped and ready to receive our spending money. We looked like baby birds waiting for their mother to bring them a worm! It was our chance to get a little treat for ourselves.

Also, we didn’t realize it, but our dad was teaching us in small ways, how to manage money and make our own choices.

Well, I never liked parting with my spending money unless it was something I really, really wanted. My indulgence of choice was Star Trek cards (The Original Series, of course), which came in packets with bubble gum, similar to baseball cards. I still have those cards, by the way! I liked holding on to my money, so I would save. And save and save and save. My coins would clank and jingle as I dropped each one in my metal world-globe coin-bank. I still have that too!

By the time I was 9 or 10, I was periodically tracking my money thus: I took a sheet of notebook paper and listed how many quarters I had, how many dimes, how many nickels, etc, and multiply out the values. Then I added them all up to come up with a grand total. Here’s an example:

quarters: 13 x 25¢ = $3.25
dimes: 9 x 10¢ = 90¢
nickels: 17 x 5¢ = 85¢
pennies: 52¢
-----------
$5.52

Finally, I physically counted out all my coins to verify that the counted total matched the multiplied total. I had no concept of “cash reconciliations” in my preteens, but that was exactly what I was doing: a simple version of a cash rec.

I took my time and was very methodical about counting my coins. Oh, but it was so much fun! Managing money was like a hobby, to me.

Even as a child, I tended to think of things in terms of how much they cost, and how much will I have if I save X amount for 10 weeks, etc. If an amount I’d saved was earmarked for a certain purpose, I never touched it or dipped into it – I treated it as if it weren’t there at all. Yes, even as a grade-schooler, I understood the value and importance of money.

My family never quite understood my obsession with money, though. My sister labeled me stingy and selfish. And yes, I was quite tight with money. But behind that was the need to keep things organized and managed. It would have been nice if my parents had encouraged me, saying “You’re pretty good at keeping money managed. You do it better than a lot of grownups. You could have a career in banking or accounting one day.” No, I never got any such encouragement. I just lived with the “stingy” label.

Another thing they never understood was my love of math and numbers! In 4th grade I would get those math activity-books at K-Mart; I would get the ones on the 6th-grade level. My mom said they’d take us kids to Kmart to get a toy -- because a trip to Kmart to pick out a new toy was a TREAT -- and I’d pick out those math books. Said she never could understand it! Said I’d work thru those math workbooks as enthusiastically as the others played with their toys.

Even so, it never occurred to me to study Accounting until I was in my early 20’s. Actually, I had thought working in a bank would be a good fit for my ambitions. Oh, I’ve applied and interviewed with several banks in my life, but never got any job offers. I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

(to be continued....)