What his parents save in cash he loses in schoolyard beatings, no doubt.

My lovely sister Ruth bless her, receives regular emails from a little group called Simplesavings.com.au.

The group, which basically consists of regular emails advising readers how they can save money around the house, is frankly quite pitiful.

But every so often it throws up a real gem, which Ruth passes on to me and which, to me, which makes the entire thing worthwhile. This one, received today, is actually on a par with a previous ‘hint of the week’ classic involving the story of the mother who, instead of buying her son the Spiderman costume he desired, wrapped him in a garbage bag and gave him a ball of wool in place of the more traditional ‘proper costume’ and ‘working web’.

Read on…

"From: SimpleSavings info@simplesavings.com.au
Subject: Simple Savings: Hint of the Week - July 6Date:
7 Jul 2007

KIDS CAN MAKE THEIR OWN TRADING CARDS

We are saving up to $10 a time on trading card games for my eight year
old son! He is very much into trading cards like YuGiOh, Transformers and so on but these packs cost anywhere from a couple of dollars up to $10, depending on the pack sizes and so on. As you need in the vicinity of 40 cards to play these games, it soon gets pricey! So instead, we encourage him to draw and he comes up with some incredible characters and ideas which I use our digital camera to photograph, then load them onto the computer.

We then locate websites, of which there are many, to locate templates for these style of cards. We load his drawings into the templates and apply skills and actions with appropriate points onto the card and save them. When he has devised a game plan, we can print out as many cards as required, with some spares for his younger brother. If the cards get scruffy from over playing we reprint; laminating also can prolong life. This is a great exercise in planning and making them come up with new games and ideas and they end up with cool personalised trading cards. Hours of fun are spent designing our cards.

The only cost is time and a dollar or two spent printing - it works out even cheaper if done in black and white, which can be coloured in. Another activity perfect for rainy days, and as for spending quality, creative time doing activities together? It's priceless!"