TV Money Notebooks

When I was a kid, my parents tried to get my brother and me to read more and watch television less. I was probably around seven or eight years old when they instituted “TV Money” (where my brother and I had to pay to watch television). TV Money came in thirty and sixty-minute increments, and my dad designed them using family stuffed animals instead of American presidents for the faces on the “money” bills.

If I’m remembering correctly, our allowance was TV Money. There were two types: blue and white; both could be used to watch TV, but the white TV money had the extra option of converting it to actual money (one minute equaled one cent). We could earn more TV money by reading books; each page read equaled one minute of television time. (It’s because of this that my brother ended up reading Gone With the Wind, as it has over a thousand pages and therefore worth over a thousand minutes of television time). We used TV money for a few years; I can’t remember exactly when we stopped (probably once we got too old for it).

I decided to create a TV Money notebook for my brother as a reminder of our childhood quest for television time. I used a ten-dollar bill as a general reference for the style and placement of the text and images, and designed my own TV money using our stuffed animals Bear-Bear, Pan-Pan and Zeb-Zeb in place of the presidents. 

Originally I was just going to make one pad, but after creating my TV money I decided on making three separate pads: one bill per pad. And since a bill is two-sided, I wanted to create the back of the TV Money as well so that each pad had a front and back that was similar to actual money. It took longer to create than I’d anticipated but I’m happy with the result. I think my TV Money Notebooks are very cute.