AT just 15, Wickham’s Michael Maker knows a thing or two about running a household.
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In January, Michael was required to step up and take control of the family’s finances as part of a TV series Teenage Boss.
The series is an observational documentary shot for ABC Me.
Teenage Boss sees a range of teenagers from diverse families put in charge of the monthly budget to teach them, and their parents, valuable lessons about financial responsibility and planning.
“My dad put a month’s worth of funds into my hands to manage the household for a month,” Michael said.
“Bills, rent, water, electricity and my dad ended up getting a fine so I had to pay for that as well.
“He drives trucks and missed a weigh station. It was a $700 fine. It was so bad.”
Week one went well. Michael and his best friend Patrick McLachlan, 15, hit the shops on a spending spree.
“We did an Aldi trip and filled the trolley. We bought a coffee machine,” Patrick said. “I tried to help him budget, but he doesn’t like budgeting.”
Michael said the spending part was fun, but paying bills was not so much fun.
“I was excited, I thought I was going to be able to buy a whole lot of stuff, but it was harder than I thought it was going to be,” he said.
He was also required to do grocery shopping for the whole family, including his father, who is a vegetarian, his brother John, 14, and his uncle.
“I don’t actually know what vegetarians eat,” he said.
“My first thought was to just buy him a big head of lettuce, but then he kind of got annoyed, ‘cause I didn’t buy him any food at all.
“I had to learn how to cook vegetarian food. There were a lot of late night shopping trips to get vegetarian food, a lot of vegetarian pizza because I didn’t want to cook very often.”
Eddie Woo, a Sydney-based maths teacher known for his YouTube maths videos, is one of the show’s hosts.
He travelled to Newcastle to help Michael work out a budget for the month.
It will be broadcast later this year.
“He came and helped me do all the math work,” he said.
“A film crew came down and we would go places, like shopping.”
Under Woo’s mentorship, the 14 part series follows the teenagers through the ups, downs, fun and fear of the real world financial challenges their parents have to face every day.
Michael said he was happy to see the experiment end.
“I just wanted the weight of having to run the household off my back,” he said.
“I didn’t want to keep doing the adult work.”