Have you ever wondered why so many adults spend so much time worrying about money? Why do millions of adults get up every morning and go to work for eight or ten hours a day? Why are news shows and newspapers so full of economic news? Why do married couples frequently fight about money?

To understand adults, you have to understand money. Once you understand money, adults make a lot more sense.

For any normal adult today, money ranks right up there next to oxygen. Without money you cannot eat. You have no place to sleep. You cannot drive. You have no freedom. It is this simple reality that causes adults to be so concerned about money.

Most teenagers do not understand the importance of money. Nor do they understand the amount of money that is required to live a normal life. This occurs for a very simple reason — parents provide teenagers with everything.

Let's say that you were to get totally fed up with your parents. In a fit of passion you decide at age 16 to run away from home. Your goal is to live a normal life, not an extravagant life, just a normal life.

What is your first step? You need an apartment. You stop at a convenience store and find a copy of the apartment locator magazine. You quickly find that any "nice" apartment cost upwards of $1,500 for a one-bedroom unit.

You get a copy of the paper to look in the classified ads and find the cheapest apartment available. No air-conditioning, for example. Peeling paint. The carpeting is dirty and worn down. The toilet won't flush, but the man showing you the apartment says he will fix that.

You can see all the pipes and they are all rusty. You have to put down the last month's rent and a security deposit. Just to move in you need over $2,000. Then you need $1,500 per month, every month.

That alone should be enough to make you realise the harsh reality of the real world, considering at 16, with not even a high school education, if you find a job where you get paid $10 an hour you're lucky but you'll only be making $1,600 a month. On top of that, deductions for health care, payroll tax, pension and more are taken out make it impossible to even cover rent, let alone the cost of anything else.

If you really think about it, you'll discover five things:

[bul] You must do something with your life so you can make more than minimum wage (although there is no minimum wage stipulated by the Bermudian government). It is impossible to survive on minimum wage. When you hear adults constantly talking about a "good job" so they sound like a broken record, that's why.

[bul] You don't mind making minimum wage when you are a teenager living with your parents because it is easy. Your parents are paying the rent, buying food, covering all the bills, giving you clothes and loaning you a car. You should now see that minimum wage won't cut it when you are out on your own.

[bul] You really need your family to help you get started in "real life". How else can you handle that $5,000 start-up fee? There is no way to start a household for any less than $5,000. Your parents can help you with expenses, loan you furniture, and so on.

[bul] If you were to actually find yourself in this position, it would be difficult to get out of it. When you are working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, there isn't a lot of time for anything else. The only way to get a better job is to get more education. But when, exactly, are you going to get it?

[bul] A person in this position has no freedom. You are absolutely stuck in that rut and there is no way out. You get up every day and go to work, then you come home dead tired and feel like you are trapped in a prison cell. Money is freedom.

Right now you might be thinking: "There are lots of jobs out there that pay a lot more than minimum wage. I'll get one of those jobs. It's easy."

Keep this in mind: All of the jobs paying better than minimum wage are being fought for by people who give a damn. You aren't just going to walk into an office one day and be handed an easy $40,000+ a year job. There are other people in line trying to get that job just like you. They would love to have that job.

Let's look at your parents. What is motivating them? They are faced with these same money concerns every day. The difference is that if they mess up it's not one person who ends up on the street, it's the whole family. Even if you live in what appears to be an extremely safe area, you might be surprised at how precarious things are under the covers. It really depends on how good your parents are at managing their money.

Let's say that your father has a good engineering job. He is making $60,000 a year. His job covers his health insurance and gives him two weeks of paid vacation per year. You live in a nice, four-bedroom home. You have a brother (also a teenager) and a sister (ten years old). Your mother stays at home.

Let's look at a likely monthly budget for the household. Let's say that the house cost $850,000 when your parents purchased it five years ago. They paid $20,000 to 30,000 down and locked in a fixed rate 30-year mortgage. They pay homeowners' insurance and monthly property taxes. The house also needs to be maintained at a rate of perhaps $100 per month.

This covers things like a new furnace, water damage, roof repair, repainting, recarpeting, new appliances and so on.

On the car side the monthly payments are about $400. Then they have to pay for car insurance and monthly maintenance. Food is running about $300 per month. Power, water, etc. is about $200 plus on average per month. The phone plus long distance is running $100 per month. Cable is $100.

Your parents also have other goals. If they are smart, they are saving between $6,000 and $9,000 per year for retirement. They are also putting something aside to cover future college costs for you and your siblings.

It is when you begin to realise the level of sacrifice your parents made to raise you and the amount of financial juggling they did to give you what you wanted that you begin to truly respect and appreciate them. That process starts perhaps at age 20 or 25, but doesn't really hit you until you are into your 30s and raising your own family.

It is not something you, nor your peers, ever realise or appreciate as a teenager.

These examples should help you to understand why money is so important. Most teenagers live in a protected dream world that totally isolates them from the realities of financial life, and that isolation can make it extremely hard to understand why adults are so preoccupied with money, taxes, their jobs, etc.

The sooner you realise how important finances and jobs are to your future well being, the sooner you can begin planning and preparing for your own financial independence.