of the cans I would collect and fill up giant plastic bags with them (another ex

pense that I covered using my birthday money). I began to save the accumulating
bags of cans in the box car.
Every day, I would crush all of the uncrushed cans on our property, and every we
ek, I would go on my can collecting route, getting cans from neighbors and crushin
g them. This went on for more than a year as the boxcar slowly began to fill wit
h bags of cans.
One summer day, my father came home from work and announced that the price of al
uminum was sky high
the local buyer was paying more than $0.50 per pound. We did t
he math and even with a low estimate of the can weight, we were getting numbers
in the range of $400. It was time to sell them, and we decided to do it that Sat
urday.
At that point, I flew into a fury of can collection madness. I walked along road
sides collecting cans, I checked the neighbors bins every day, and I made sure ev
ery single can was crushed.
Around this time, one of my cousins stopped by to say hello to my father. I had
a generally pleasant relationship with him, but he was about twenty five and I w
as ten, so it was just cordial. He asked me what I was up to and I told him that
I was crushing cans and I was about to sell them because the price was high. Wh
ile he was there, I carried a big bag of cans out to the box car and he peeked i
nside and saw all of the cans.
If you re not getting a bit of a sick feeling in your stomach reading this, you sh
ould be.
Saturday morning dawns, and I m bouncing off the walls, ready to go to the metal s
alesman and sell my cans. I was planning on buying a really, really nice basebal
l glove, four games for my Nintendo, and putting the remainder into my savings a
ccount for a car or for college. All of my work for an entire year was about to
finally pay off. To put this in perspective, I was estimating about $400 to $450
worth of cans here and to that point in my life I had never actually seen a hun
dred dollar bill. I was going to cash the check and actually receive a couple of
these and hold them in my hand.
My father woke up and estimated that it would take five pickup truck loads to ha
ul all of the cans to the dealer, so we got started immediately. I ran to the bo
x car while he backed the truck up to it to unload the cans. I tossed open the d
oor, looked inside
And there was not an aluminum can to be found.
My father and I both stood there in what amounted to shock. When the finality of
what had happened finally began to click with me, I just walked back to the hou
se, went up to my bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the bed alone for a while
. My father didn t come up to see how I was doing, but when my mother came home fr
om the grocery store, I could hear him in a rage downstairs, sounding as though
he was literally ready to kill the person who could do such a thing to a child.
It wasn t long before the culprit was exposed. That afternoon, my father got an in
teresting call from an old friend of his: my cousin, the one who had seen my can
s just a few days before, showed up out of the blue at the friend s house with $30
0 in cash and bought a used motorcycle that the fellow was trying to sell. In th
e end, though, it didn t really make any difference; my cousin actually admitted t
o taking the cans, but said he would deny it to the police and there was no proof
.

In short, I lost a year s worth of work and more money than I could even imagine b
ecause of the thievery of someone in my own family. That individual was so full
of cowardice that he stole a year s worth of work from a child to buy himself a to
y.
Looking back at my behavior since then, it s clear to me how much this event impac
ted my thinking about personal finance. My biggest fear is a lack of safety. I o
ften don t feel safe with anything that I own. I am particularly paranoid about my
own life insurance and my desire to have a very large emergency fund. And I oft
en spend frivolously because I feel a sense of safety knowing that I actually ca
n spend money and buy things. These actions seem contradictory, but they all hav
e the same root cause: I yearn for the safety and security that was violated whe
n I was just a little kid.
The second thing I learned is that this event caused me to not trust anyone, par
ticularly when it comes to money. Because of this one act by an individual who w
anted a motorcycle to play around with, I grew up with an inability to trust any
one with money. I started to keep any money I had in very well hidden spots and
I wouldn t trust anyone with it. For the longest time, I was even afraid to put mo
ney into bank accounts because I knew that when you put something valuable in a
place, even if you think it s safe, it s not really safe. It s still a challenge for m
e to make deposits into savings accounts or money market accounts, even to this
day.
I had shut this memory out of my mind for many years, not wanting to remember th
at day I opened up the box car doors and saw that all of my aluminum cans are go
ne. Remembering it now has made me stronger.