MONEY: In the US, while their classmates are off playing basketball or trying to lose weight, some children are busy planning their pensions. Jonathan Green visits a 'money camp', where whizz kids as young as 11 learn how to manage their financial future.
Devon Green, the slim, glamorous CEO of a Florida recycling company, waits for her morning conference call. She sighs as she pops open her compact to apply her lipstick. The speakerphone crackles into life with the voice of David A. Henwood, chief investment officer for investment consultants Raymond James, one of the east coast's foremost equity analysts of 30 years standing. The call over, Devon strides purposefully from one of the conference rooms in the bowels of the $400-a-night, five-star Ritz Carlton hotel.
In the lobby, she approaches her business partner Jesse and pulls her hair. She then grabs her wrists and swings her round, so that Jesse's feet leave the floor and her body revolves in a ruthless blur. Then Devon dumps her unceremoniously on the ground.
She turns to me. "See I'm a regular kid when I'm with my friends or my sister, and then I turn the switch and I'm a businesswoman."
Devon Green, founder and CEO of Devon's Heal the World Recycling, is 11 years old. Her business partner and sister, Jesse, is five.
And Devon has just taken one of her first classes in investing in today's bear market. Both she and her sister are here in the sumptuous grounds of the Palm Beach Ritz Carlton for the Kids' Money Camp, one of several such camps that take place during US school holidays. Parents from all over the US have trumped up around $950 for the camp and the chintz splendour of the hotel's rooms for their kids so that they can learn about stock market indexes, money mergers, stocks, bonds and mutual funds.
And while other parents send their kids to toast marshmallows and sing songs around camp fires, the parents sending their offspring to money camp are millionaires - billionaires even - and they expect their children to behave commensurably with the fortunes they have accrued.
Leading the happy campers at this particular gathering is Susan Bradley, a self-styled financial guru with a lacquered hairstyle and a glossy manner to match. A redoubtable woman, she is well known around the palm-fronded mansions of Palm Beach with her "Sudden Money Institute" - dedicated to "helping" those who have suddenly got rich. She has been running the camps since 1995 in a town obsessed with money.
Because, aside from the cavernous mansions in the area owned by Don King, Jim Clark of Netscape and Si Newhouse of Conde Nast, Florida has no state income tax, and it is legal to file for bankruptcy and still keep your property. Thus, the local paper in Palm Beach is constantly reporting cases of sequestered wealth, insider trading deals, and migrants in their droves scurrying for sanctuary from the fast-collapsing world of corporate America. So much so that the population around Palm Beach has doubled recently. Bradley's motivation for her summer camp is clear: "Money is the most powerful force on the planet," she says with a slight lisp, before adding warily, "aside from religion".
There are 13 kids at the camp, ranging in age from 11 to 19. Swishing into the hotel's driveway in a Mercedes C230 and pushing his Mont Blanc pen into his top pocket, is 16-year-old Paul Lambert. "This is the most exciting thing I have done all summer," he says. "I want to be a CEO when I get older; yes, the money and power are the draw," he nods, handing the keys to the valet. But what about Enron, Worldcom and the tawdry scandals which have robbed people of their life's savings? "Bad accounting," he says.
Now on his third money camp since the age of 12 is the aptly named Cash. "I was not named after money," he says, somewhat irritably. "My dad is an entrepreneur and named me after the James Garner character Cash McCall who was always looking for the next business opportunity - my dad said if he ever had a kid that's what he'd call him."
But ask Cash about the speakers at the camp and he is almost breathless with excitement at the prospect of talks from stripey-shirted, braces-wearing brokers, investment managers and heads of corporate departments. "Where else could you get to speak to the top people from the biggest capitalist economy in the world?" he asks excitedly. "It's like going to baseball camp and Michael Jordan is there."
Cash, who goes to the English public school Stoneyhurst and has homes in Ascot and nearby Palm Beach, is wary of the press. "When I was younger I used to love to tell a story about a friend of my dad's who built up a company, put it in his girlfriend's name and then bankrupted it," says the 16-year-old. "I was interviewed and they jumped on that, which I thought was unfair. I just wanted to be like my dad."
Susan Bradley opens the three-day camp with a fiery introduction on the importance of money. Each child is given her book on sudden wealth and a neat little mound of baseball hats, T-shirts, teddy bears and golf nick-nacks, all emblazoned with corporate sponsors. "These people want their logo in front of you because you're the future," she resounds. "But why is money important? When you speak with your friends about it, are there some people who think, y'know, you're a better person if you don't have any?" Some of the kids nod. Bradley continues: "But is there anything that doesn't have anything to do with money?" The kids shake their heads. "Noooooo that's right!" says Bradley with a whoop.
Over the next few days they are taken through conference calls and lectures, and cajoled into answering questions from Bradley, who throws out more complimentary corporate merchandise for the correct answer.
The star of the camp is undoubtedly Devon, who even gives a talk to the rest of the kids as part of the syllabus. She started her can recycling business at the age of seven, when her neighbour gave her some cans after a party to take to the dump. Since then, Devon has expanded it into a thousands-of-dollars business, donating 30 per cent of her profits to charity and 20 per cent as gifts. The remainder is fed into her bank account and a nice mutual fund she has had going for a few years.
She's a star in Florida, winning a litany of charitable awards such as the Miss Pre-Teen America Scholarship and the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast's Chocolate Festival top fundraiser and volunteer. Incredibly, she is a member of the Palm City Chamber of Commerce, along with bankers, lawyers and local businessmen. They talk about her with awe, and love to recount the story of how Devon was talking to a possible contact at a Chambers business functions but had run out of business cards. She asked him to wait, and, thinking she was out of his eyeline, hopped, skipped and jumped - missing all the cracks in the flagstones on the floor - to a table where her cards were. She then calmly picked up her cards, jumped round and gracefully walked back handing over a card with a flawless, corporate grin.
Her speech may be rehearsed to a tee but it's engaging. And when there aren't any volunteers from the entire room of kids, stockbrokers in black braces and other adults to come to the front and hold a magnet against various metallic objects to demonstrate that anything magnetic cannot be recycled - Devon taps her feet, examines her fingernails and says baldly: "I wanna see a show of hands next time." When she ends with, "I may be one person, but I am one person who can make a difference", the other campers swallow hard, while clapping.
Balancing Jesse on his knee and with a camcorder glued to his eye throughout the entire event, is Devon's dad, Michael. One feels he was largely responsible for her website and business name, Devon Heals the World. He smiles fondly at her as she gives him a proprietorial wink during her speech. "She learnt how to make money at an early age," he says, grinning. "But I've seen her turn that switch - one minute she's the young ambassador, theyoung businesswoman, and then she's back to being a kid. If she ends up as a leader of a large business well " And he's lost in reverie, dreaming of the future. But snapping out of it and keen to emphasise his daughter's charitable streak as well as her money-making potential, he adds hurriedly, "but if she had to close a plant or something because it was unprofitable she would find jobs for everyone there."
That said, Devon seems rather taken with a speech by Sharon MacDonald from Mergers and Acquisitions at Renaissance World Wide. As the kids sit wide-eyed, Sharon details her meteoric and ruthless ascent of the corporate gum tree in New York, talking about the "Pac-man theory" and how when she goes into companies to position for re-sale, she "cuts out all the dead wood". Devon is listening intently.
Afterward, the kids are told to form groups and draw up a short-term goal and a long-term goal, and explain how both can be achieved financially. One group comes up with buying a Gucci handbag, the next two buying cars, and Devon wants to buy a little dog for $500 - which everyone oohs and aahs about. Yet her long-term goal, it transpires, inspired by Sharon's talk, is to go one stage further. She intends to buy out and own the pet shop within five years of buying her little dog. What happens if the owner loves his shop and doesn't want to sell, I ask her. "Then there would be a hostile takeover," she says rather irritably, while working on the figures.
Bradley is keen to play down this sort of attitude, and there is a large part of the course devoted to philanthropy. Many of the kids here are so rich that they will give millions away for tax breaks, and, they claim, in order to help those less fortunate than themselves. There is a talk by Phil Flynn of Philanthropic Focus, an organisation that specialises in setting up foundations so wealthy families can "give in the right way".
The kids are asked to read USA Today and asked what charity they would give it to and why. Devon decides on setting up a charity for victims of West Bank violence. "We'd give money to families who have lost loved ones," she says, with a warm grin, but then thinks further. "But we'd probably give more if they lost a father, y'know someone who was bringing in a decent income, than if they lost a sister or something." She thinks a little further. "Not that they are not important family members ... but well, they don't earn as much."
Many of the kids from wealthy backgrounds are already fluent with the language of "charity". Dave and Becky Serwitz, 16 and 19 from California, are accompanied throughout the entire camp by their parents, Marshall and BJ.
The Serwitzes are a huge extended family and there are four other siblings, all away on other money camps. "When people ask why we have such a large family, they say we must either be Catholic, Mormon or stupid!" says Dad. "Well we're not Catholic or Mormon." And with that the whole family breaks into wheezing, raucous laughter.
Marshall is a financial adviser only dealing with rich Californians who have a minimum of $3 million to invest. He sits at the back of all the talks, either nodding his head in agreement or contradicting what the speakers say. He gives his kids $300 to give away every year, and each year the family will call in notable charities to Dad's office and give a presentation to prove why they should get the money - they will then all decide who to give the money to. Last year, though, it was Dave's college wrestling team. "Well that's a worthy cause isn't it?" he says with a grin.
Like other parents, Marshall has sent his kids here to acquire one of life's most important skills. "If you are just a little bit financially literate, and start from an early age, that can make a huge difference over a lifetime," he says, proudly. In quieter moments the kids are not quite so enamoured. "Well there's no way I would tell my friends I had been here," says Becky. "I'd never hear the end of it."
But isn't there a caveat here - shouldn't children just be children and only have to suffer the horrors of money management when they are older? "That's an attitude we get from the British press all the time," says Bradley. "Money is not a good or bad thing - it's a fact of life. I mean where else are these kids gonna get this type of knowledge? It's a crucial life skill."
Devon Green, her glossy PR faltering slightly and the needs of an 11-year-old child taking over, seems somewhat pleased it's over. "Dad can we go to the beach now?" she implores. No, he says, it's a long drive back up state to where they live. It seems even those who have to heal the world can't get time off these days.