Rich kids packed off to fat-wallet camp

Summer camps teach financial responsibility early

Trend.  Pages are flying off the school calendar, which means that parents, rich and poor, are all asking the same perennial question: What to do with the kids? Plan too little, and they could end up sleeping till noon, wasting away their idyllic childhood summer.

For ultra-wealthy kids, there’s a niche of summer camps designed to help them hop off the couch and confront the burden of their bulging inheritance.

At $5,000 a head, The Paul Merage School of Business runs a two-day retreat covering subjects like estate tax and how to ask for a prenup. For teenage trust-fund campers, California’s Joline Godfrey offers two programs, Camp $ummer $tock and $tart-Up, where kids spend their days piecing together a stock portfolio or a business plan.

Yet what elevates these programs into the stratosphere normally associated with childhood summers is their hidden curriculum: Underneath the “flash drills” on tax code, the camps are designed to help youngsters find meaningful lives in an ocean of privilege and possibility.

“Parents who remark, ‘My children are set for life. They don’t need to worry about money,’ may unintentionally deny their children a purposeful life,” writes Godfrey, and her camps reflect that sentiment.

At camp $tart-Up, for example, “being an entrepreneur can mean anything from being an author to running a school to running a foundation,” she says. And the speakers and role models who get paraded in front of the kids aren’t number-crunching, multi-billionaires, but hip, self-motivated 20-to-30-year-olds who love what they do.

They talk a good game about how to make money, but at the end of the week, these peculiar camps address a much harder question: What to do with it?