When i was little, my grandpa used to pretend to swallow a quarter and then magically pull it out from behind my ear or someplace. I believed that he really did behold the power to change money from one value to another because one time i gave him a quarter and a dime and i think a penny and he "swallowed" them all at once and pulled out a Fifty dollar bill. I thought he was so good that i decided to give me back the 50 for a larger bill but my change came back instead. So young and already gambling.

Sassy Nassy

my dad convinced me that gambling machines had little hands which came out the money return bit and stole all your cash. i was terrified of them for years. stoped me gambling though.

matty

When I was growing up I used to hear my mother talk about her Salary and how much she got. I thought that at the end of the week she just got a bunch of celery to bring home.

codeman

I used to think that all banks led to a giant 'super-bank' through underground tunnels and everyone had a little lead box there with their name on it and all their money inside. I therefore assumed that putting money in the stock market meant taking your box to a market, presumanbly in Camden Town, and hiding it there.
And of course, money gets teleported from the super-bank to cash machines, otherwise how would it be your money?

Anon

When I was little, I loved to toss money into wishing wells. I believed that when people tossed their money, they all wished for money and thats why there was always so many coins in the well. One day, I decided I would go home and use one of my mother's pots. I placed the pot in the garage along with some water and threw a couple of coins in the water, wishing for more money. Each day, I woke up hoping that my wish would come true, however, the well never grew any money for me. After a while, I gave up. I was puzzled.

Karen

When I was a child, I saw in a cartoon how people put some coins in the earth, and after a certain period a tree who produced money grew on this place. I was amazed about the idea that you could become rich in this way. So I tried the same, but unfortunately without success...

Claudio

When I was a child I used to believe that a coin was better value than a note. When I had got some note I always asked mother to exchange note to coin.
My mother was laughing at me then exchanged ten cent coin to ten euro note. zzz...

Lee

When I was in grade school we were learning about the Presidents. Well I knew the first one was George Washington (because he was on the $1 dollar bill)well I ALWAYS thought Abraham Lincoln was the second President(Because he's on the $5 dollar bill)so I also thought that the third president was Hamilton and so on and so forth... I had misunderstood my teacher. She must have said that Lincoln might have been the sencond most important president. I believed this until I was in late teens...

MS

When I was eleven, I had a theory that there was exactly so much money in the world that you could pay for every single thing that exists on Earth. But there was a problem: while both the money and the things themselves were considered valuable, only the things had actual value - the value of money was only symbolic. So our economic system assumed that there was twice as much wealth in the world than there actually was. This made the system inherently unstable and created a need to devalue money and property. That was my explanation for inflation.

Martin

When I was quite young, I was sure the
Dow Jones Av. was actually the Dodge owned.
I did not know the difference until I saw
it in print.

William Dee Campbell

A life of innocent security came to an abrupt end one day when i asked my mother to buy me a toy. She replied that she didn't have the money for it, to which i replied that she should just go to the bank. She then explained that the bank wasn't just a place that gave you endless amounts of money whenever you wanted it. It was your money in the first place, and could run out just like that.

Deborah

when I first heard about insurance, I thought it was a small group of old men in black (clothes, hat, shoes, sunglasses...) that you gave your money to, and when the house burned down - or something like that - they would come and pay for the damage

Mim

My little cousin Robbie who is about 6 thinks that all American money is the same---he counts a penny as one, a 20 dollar bill as one, and a 5 dollar bill as one dollar, it doesn't matter what type of money it is. All bills and coins---to him---are counted as one dollar!

For example one day he had a five dollar bill and a one dollar bill in his pocket. He took the money out and counted it aloud. "I have two dollars". He actually had 6 dollars!

Goatgirl

When I was young (about 7) I would hear my parents talk about Liability Insurance. The whole time they discussed this I thought it was a great thing....buy this insurance and if you had a wreck you could lie about what really happened in the accident. Not until I was older and paying for my own insurance did I realize the truth. My mom thinks that story is so funny.

Alisia Newton

My daughter, when she was small, used to think that when you took money to put in the bank, that the bank had seperate piles of everyone's money. So she had her seperate little pile in the bank and when she wanted to take some out, they would have to go to her little pile to get it.

Pat

I used to believe that adults had as much money as they wanted, a never ending supply. I used to think my mother was so stingy when she wouldn't give me a few dollars to buy lollies from the shop!

Kim

I used to think that the bills you deposited in the bank were the same bills you got back later -- until I was about 15 years old!

Anon

Once when I was very young, I overheard someone talking about "borrowing $10." It made no sense to me. If you borrow something, then you have to return it, but what was the point of borrowing a ten dollar bill unless you needed to spend it. And once you spent it, how could you give it back. It never occurred to me that you could pay back a debt with a different bill.

John

When I was kid I used to believe that I had to earn enough money to have one of everything that existed.

Anon