Lessons in the value of money from Chester A Riley

Have you ever heard of a film called “Cash on the Barrel Head” or Chester A Riley or William Bendix?

William Bendix played Riley in a sitcom, “ The Life of Riley” the story of a middle class factory worker for whom life, including financial life, was an ongoing challenge.  Nothing seemed to go right for the good-hearted, but inept Riley. 

I remember the film from my early days in employee benefits around 1961. It was an educational/training film trying to make a point to workers. 

Riley talks his boss into giving him cash in exchange for all his benefits. He expected to be cash rich.

But Riley learns the hard way that trading his company-provided benefits for more cash isn’t worth it — giving up things like vacation time, health insurance, pension, and other fringe benefits he can’t easily replace. I can just picture poor Riley navigating health insurance in the 21st century🤑

For one thing the benefits are mostly tax free, plus costs are lower on a group basis. I suspect many workers today don’t understand or appreciate what Riley learned sixty-five years ago. 

Americans are generally not considered financially literate as a population. Recent data from 2025 and early 2026 consistently show that financial literacy levels in the US remain low to moderate, with significant gaps in knowledge and widespread self-reported or objective shortfalls in understanding key personal finance concepts.

I also see a bit of an analogy with the angst many individual’s have over taxes. Unlike much of Europe and Scandinavia,  Americans seem to struggle seeing the benefits they receive from the taxes they pay. In fact, many Americans would be happy with lower or no taxes thus freeing their new found cash to go it alone. The word “empowerment” is often mentioned. Actually doing that would be an interesting, but likely disastrous experiment. 

Recently we are hearing of a suggestion for government to give citizens a pool of money so they can “negotiate” their own healthcare. That should be interesting. I write a lot about paying for healthcare on my blog, but unfortunately the topic has become too political for HD. (If you are adventurous, the address of my blog is in my HD profile)

Sometimes the value of our money isn’t where we expect it to be.