I’M SENSING SOME JUDGMENT HERE, but I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Try to see it as an opportunity for my wife and I to teach our children—and now, it seems, your children—an important lesson about the complexity of financial instruments. Honestly, you can’t put a price tag on that. 

Well, sure, you can put a price tag on it. You own our debt. 

But right now I’m not talking to you as someone who, in a moment of gross insolvency, decided to issue bonds to his children. I’m talking to you, parent-to-parent, about bestowing knowledge to the next generation, which, much like this debt, might stay with them forever.

Now you’re going to threaten me? I think my effort here has gone beyond good faith—especially because this is all just a big misunderstanding that started when my wife and I tried to limit our boys’ screen time during the pandemic. 

You see, when the stay-at-home orders were issued last spring, we knew they’d be prone to watching too much television. So we created a system that incentivized reading instead. 

Each week, they were given $10 for doing their chores. An hour of television cost them $1. An hour of reading earned them $1. To foster independence and responsibility, we let them budget and allocate however they saw fit. 

And the results were amazing! Almost immediately, our boys reported they’d quit television altogether and were reading five to six hours a day.

I say “reported” because at the time my wife and I were unable to oversee them directly. We’d locked ourselves in separate bathrooms in order to do work that would only mean something if the world happened to avoid complete chaos.  

You remember. It was a dark time for everyone, but the one bright spot was the way our boys worked their way through veritable libraries’ worth of books. 

It almost seemed too good to be true. In fact, sometimes I thought I heard the television, but my boys assured me that was just because I was so used to hearing it. “Phantom sound,” they called it.  

In retrospect, this claim might not have been completely honest, but I didn’t have time to investigate. I was preoccupied with work-related tasks, such as trying to find an amusing Zoom background that might distract colleagues from the fact that our company’s revenue had dropped 83 percent almost overnight.  

By the beginning of April, our boys had amassed a large multiple of their weekly allowance and showed no signs of slowing down. My wife and I weren’t worried, though, because our president assured us the pandemic was on a “beautiful timeline” and should just go away by Easter. 

But Easter came and went, and then my wife and I were laid off from our jobs. 

We’re not complaining, mind you. We understand this happened to millions of people. So many, in fact, that our state’s unemployment website crashed, and its telephone lines were so overwhelmed that I couldn’t reach a representative even though I was calling them more than twelve times a day. 

Meanwhile, the boys worked their way through the entire Magic Tree House series and then turned their sights on the A to Z Mysteries. 

Without income or the ability to apply for unemployment, my wife and I started to feel the bite from those reading fees, as well as the cost of all those books (because our local library was closed). 

So we sat the boys down and announced that in lieu of their regular allowance and reading bonuses, we would issue them bonds with maturity options of 6, 12, and 18 months, depending on the interest rate they wanted to collect.

They went with the 6-month option, which we found a little insulting. Nonetheless, that seemed like plenty of time to get our cash flow in order. 

Before we knew it, the holidays were approaching, and to avoid defaulting, we issued another series of bonds at a higher interest rate. By then, however, the boys were savvy enough to see where things were headed. Almost immediately, they repackaged the securities and traded them to your son for Pokemon cards. Specifically, Marshadow, Umbreon, and Charizard GX Pokemon cards. Apparently, they’re all pretty good ones. 

In private, we’ve since had a few talks about this kind of speculative trading—especially in our current economic climate. Still, my wife and I were impressed by how they discovered the basic concepts of collateralized debt all on their own!

Now, as our bonds have reached maturity, it looks like we owe your son $19,000. Our liquidity hasn’t improved that much. So here we are, in good faith, open to discussing a reasonable way forward.

The first option we’d like to explore is…we give you the Pokemon cards back and have a good laugh about it?

No? That’s not something you’re willing to entertain? 

Well then, it looks like our boys’ next lesson will be about “debt restructuring” because Mom and Dad are completely underwater. I mean, it’s tap city over here. If we were a government, we’d have the printing presses running day and night. If we were a financial institution, we’d be pitching the idea that we’re too big to fail.

But, clearly, we’re not a government. And we’re not too big to fail. In fact, every day it becomes more and more obvious that we’re just the right size for failure, because, you know, we’re regular people. 

The good news is, we’ve almost completely eliminated screen time because we’ve had to sell our televisions and iPads on eBay in order to buy food. 

By the way, do you know anyone who’d be interested in a full set of Magic Tree House books? They’re in great condition. Some of their spines don’t even seem like they’ve been cracked.