When we were little and used to have arguments with each other about what things were "ours", Mom always settled the matter with one statement.  "It's not yours, it's Daddy's," she'd remind us.  "He lets you use it, but it's still his."

That didn't mean one sibling could take something away from another by saying, "It's not yours, anyway!", but it did keep us from the mentality of making a division between what was ours and what was our family's.  The attitude Mom and Dad wanted to foster was selflessness rather than selfishness and also a sense of recognition that wealth or possessions never really belong to us.  If we have money, it's because it's God's money and he decided we should have it.  Ditto for any other possessions or even positions in life.

I never had an allowance as a kid.  That's because what was Mom and Dad's was mine too, Mom would say when I would mention someone we knew got an allowance.  Instead, Mom would give us money every once in a while and tell us to hang onto it for a time when we needed it.  Almost inevitably, "needing" it meant Mom would say, "If anyone has any money, we can go to McDonald's for lunch".  We would race to produce our fives or tens or twenties and say, "Oh look, we have plenty!"

Because the money was all of ours, we were very sensitive to misusing it.  Just because one brother or sister had a five or a ten in their wallet didn't mean they could arbitrarily buy themselves five candy bars: if they did, Mom probably wouldn't have given them money for a while because that kid was thinking only of themselves and being pretty irresponsible with the funds they had.  But no one ever did.  We had the sense we were just caring for the money until the time came to use it.  It wasn't ours to waste, so we didn't.  Sometimes we asked if we could spend it on something, but as young kids we were very tight with our funds and usually ended up concluding some toy we wanted wasn't worth parting with the money.  We didn't even bother asking for it because we didn't think it was a good use of the money.

When I turned eighteen, Mom was expecting a new baby and I had a brand new driver's license.  The bright idea occurred to us that I should do the shopping, but because we tended to keep our cash in the bank and pay our credit card bill once a month, I needed a credit card.  Grocery shopping quickly extended to purchases for our rental houses, which meant I needed a business credit card also.  Doing shopping from local fruit stands gave me the checkbook and the ATM card so I could pay with cash or check if needed.  Which meant that when I was nineteen and a relative was asking me concernedly if I had any money of my own, I said, "Sure - I've got access to plenty."  And it was true!  I wasn't asking my parents about purchases I was making because I didn't need to.  They had no concern about it because for years I'd had the mentality that the money wasn't mine: it was entrusted to me to care for.

My brothers and sisters have all been turning out the same.  When we first get into situations where we need to decide what to spend money on, we haven't always made the smartest choices...but that's from inexperience more than wastefulness.  We know we need to buy a gallon of paint but we might not always realize it's cheaper at one store than another, for instance.  As we've become adults, we've all contributed to our family finances in one way or another, both through work in our family business or even outside jobs like cutting the grass or working for the local clerk during elections.  The money goes into our bank account and we all use it.  Sometimes we've regarded "extra" money like that as useful for getting something it would've been a bit of a strain to get with our normal budget - like the money four of us made working for the election last November.  We cashed the checks and put them in our all-purpose cash envelope to be used in buying the last of our extended family's Christmas presents without lowering the bank account any further.  All that did was make sure money was set aside for those presents and the checks were a convenient way to do it.  In the end, we also used a chunk of that to buy a computer for my sister...and we were all thrilled because her old one had been broken for months and it was so exciting to be able to get her a new one.  None of us resented spending the money on her instead of ourselves, because it was all the same thing.  She was part of us.

One of the best parts of belonging to a family - especially a large family - is that a person can learn there is more to life than just themselves and what they want.  Keeping our money all together is just an extension of this: there are more important things to consider than the selfish urge of "I want that, so I should have it."

It's been suggested to me lately that this way of handling finances - all contributing and using the money together - is a form of communism and is oppressing the adult children by forcing them to be dependent instead of properly independent.  This is a false assumption, because communism takes all and impersonally decides everyone will "share alike".  It doesn't matter how hard a person works because they're still getting the same amount of compensation as their slacker neighbor.  They're expected to care for themselves out of that small portion and they're never really cared for as communist governments promise to do.  In a family, the money is pooled to care for all of us, not redistributed equally so we can all care for ourselves from the same amount.  We all have a responsibility to care for each other as well as ourselves and our view towards money is to help each other get what we want or need rather than think only of ourselves.  It's a perfectly natural way for a family to function and it works so well it's easy to see how communism really took hold.  People used a grain of truth in a faulty argument by suggesting a whole nation could become one big family and take care of all its members the same way a normal family did.  They forgot the key point: the general love for each other that exists in a family can't be legislated by any government.

In the end, the real value in teaching this method of dealing with money is that kids grow up knowing in effect what it takes to care for a family and feeling part of it instead of existing on their own within the family.  It's never an "us versus them" situation between kids and their parents when the kids want something the parents know they can't afford.  They also learn a mentality that they never have the right to just handle money the way they feel like it, because everything is not theirs.  Whatever they have has been entrusted to them but really belongs to God and he expects them to manage their lives in a way that glorifies him, not themselves.