My dad used a quirky supermarket game to teach me to shop wisely, and to this day his lessons save me over $1,000 a year on food

• While my mom was in the hospital, my dad took over the grocery shopping. 
• He taught my brother and me to shop carefully by playing a game where we raced through the aisles.
• We'd grab anything we wanted, then sort through it to see what was really worth buying.

When I was a kid, my mom had to spend a month in the hospital after her appendix burst. During that time, my dad became the family grocery shopper, and he took that opportunity to teach my older brother and me (ages 12 and 9) about careful spending.

Every week, my dad took us to the grocery store, grabbed a shopping cart, and started running up and down the aisles. He literally ran, swerving around other customers, the cart's wheels rattling away, and whatever my brother and I could successfully toss into the cart, within reason, we could have.

During the race, my brother and I would run ahead of our dad to confirm that our first-choice potato chips were in stock. If they were, we made sure they got into the cart on time, and if they weren't, we regrouped and grabbed our second choice, then ran ahead to beat him to the next aisle. It was a lot of fun, like being a contestant on "Supermarket Sweep."

My dad's supermarket race taught us to shop wisely at the grocery store

Realistically, my brother and I could select one item from each of the non-essential aisles, and then hope that item got approved. My dad exercised some veto power to protect the budget, so the imported British chocolate went back onto the shelf, and we learned to make reasonable selections. And no purchases were allowed in the checkout aisle, where we had to linger in line and stare at three different flavors of Skittles.

My dad's goal was to make us think harder about the products that comprise a sizable portion of the store: candy, snacks, soda, and other junk. This was in part to keep us healthy, but also to keep the bill down. Per serving, oatmeal was cheaper than Cocoa Krispies, even if you added some honey or brown sugar to it. 

This was the '90s, so in our local H-E-B, there was an entire aisle dedicated to generic products in plain, black-and-white packaging, and my dad urged us to read the list of ingredients to determine if there was any difference in quality between generic and brand-name. To this day, I estimate that my dad's supermarket race saves me around $1,200 per year on non-essential groceries alone.

My dad also prompted us to do some meal-planning. We had a say in which Night Hawk frozen dinners we brought home, and whether we had peanut butter sandwiches every single day for lunch or turkey on alternating days. 

There was also an important, non-financial benefit to this game as well: My dad successfully distracted his kids from the chilling reality that their mother was in the hospital with a life-threatening condition.

He started teaching us how to manage money many years earlier

My dad started teaching us about personal finance well before our supermarket race. I was about 7 years old when he introduced me to his mantra that "debt is slavery," which carries some extra meaning given that my brother and I are half-Black, and we lived in Texas, where literal slavery was widespread. 

My dad had some debt, but he wanted us to have as little as possible, and for him, careful spending was a stepping stone to financial freedom. We had countless talks about the difference between wants and needs, my dad saying yes to new shoes when our Payless sneakers were fraying, but no to the latest Des'ree album because listening to the radio was free.

In high school, my after-school job was tutoring younger students, and because of my dad's early influence, I budgeted every penny of that income with my ledger and No. 2 pencil. Before I went out with my friends, I determined whether I had enough money for both pizza and bowling, or maybe just one of those things. 

To this day, I rarely make impulse purchases, at the grocery store or elsewhere. I took out student loans, and more recently a mortgage, but otherwise, my consumer debt has been basically nonexistent.

This isn't to say that as a family we didn't spend money on fun things. My dad took us to the movies regularly, he just didn't allow us to buy refreshments there, and instead we snuck Ziploc bags of tortilla chips into the theater. Once he bought our tickets with spare change, insisting, "It's legal tender!" while my brother and I pretended not to know him. But his financial lessons lasted a lot longer than my embarrassment.