I did know how to budget, though. I received an allowance through college, and I knew that it needed to cover books and clothes as well as junk food and toys. If I didn’t have enough money, I could forgo treats or find ways to make more money (sell items, do surveys, do housework for people in the area). I never spent more than I could afford, which is the lesson you’re trying to teach.

I will say that the first summer that I had a job (I was 18), I was miserable. I worked in retail and never had time off that lined up with my friends’. I also had to work every weekend. I spent the entire summer alone or with my parents who were fighting all the time. Not the best introduction to the world of work.

I would consider my family upper-middle-class, and I got a job when I was 14 and a half at the local KFC. Now, I’m not trying to be one who espouses what I did as the best way; however, I feel that having a job before college is incredibly, incredibly important. By my freshman year in the dorms, I’d been working for a little over 3 years. Not for food money, not to pay rent, but to pay for Nintendo games, clothes, movies, etc. Because of this, I think I had more of a concept of budgeting, and how long it took to earn X amount of dollars.
Contrast this with some of my closest friends in college who didn’t have jobs as teenagers. They get to the dorms, it’s their first time away from home, they’re 18 and therefore newly-legal adults, and there are credit card applications everywhere. The credit card supplants the allowance they got as teenagers, and they swipe plastic for games and clothes, just like they used their allowance for in high school. All of a sudden they realize they’re up to their eyeballs in consumer debt and it takes much longer to work it off than they realized.

Also, everyone makes mistakes on the job and it is less costly to make these mistakes in your job as a 16-year-old working at Hollywood Video than as a 22-year-old in your career. Intra-office relationships, the interview process, the first time you miss work from being hung over…there are valuable lessons to be learned through experience, and that experience comes cheap when you’re young.

So, I am VERY appreciative and feel lucky to have spent my teenage years in a situation where my income wasn’t needed to support my family. But I am also appreciative that my parents let me get a job when I was young, and for the experience and lessons I gained on that path.

eBay might be a good idea for kids nowadays (it was in its infancy back then and we didn’t have a digital camera anyway). Yard sales have the fun advantage of interacting with customers and bargaining in person.

In the beginning, the parent is obviously helping more, so depending on how much the child actually did, ie enter the description, research which category sells the best, start price to attract most bidders, follow-up and shipping, etc, we have an agreed upon split ratio. As the child gets better and does more, he can keep a higher percentage.

My kids loved watching their auctions go up, especially that final hour.