A rose by any other name might not make big bucks

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2017 (3238 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wake up the kids and alert the neighbours, because I have come up with a genius money-making concept.

I am exceedingly proud of this plan, although it is not so much a get-rich-quick scheme as it is a make-a-few-bucks-when-you-are-about-to-turn-90 kind of thing.

I would appreciate it if you would keep my idea under your hats, so to speak, because the less competition the better, if you catch my subtle drift.

Before I explain my plan, I will tell you how I stumbled on this brilliant idea in the first place.

There I was, randomly Googling words on our new home computer when, suddenly and without warning, I found myself reading news reports about a cool new U.K. research study conducted by Adzuna, a search engine for job advertisements.

This groundbreaking study, conducted last month, analyzed the resumés of more than 155,000 job seekers via the use of some fancy computer algorithm to reveal the average earning potential of workers with different names.

In other words, they were able to spit out a list of baby names with the greatest future earning potential.

According to what I read in the Birmingham Mail and the Coventry Telegraph (whose slogans are “even we haven’t heard of us before”), they discovered that babies who are given traditional non-trendy names grow up to earn more money than kids stuck with funkier monikers by their hipster parents.

“As a rule of thumb, those with traditional names consistently rate as higher earners,” Doug (now that’s a quality name) Monro, co-founder of Adzuna, was quoted as saying.

“New moms and dads may want to bear this in mind when christening their babies.

“It’s interesting that the most successful workers typically use a nickname in their professional lives. This could signal an informality and approachability that has helped them climb the career tree.”

But enough beating around the potted plant. At the top of the list, boasting the most earning potential, were the boys name “Ed” and the girls name “Liz.”

According to the researchers, guys named Ed can typically expect to earn $97,472.57 per year, whereas girls named Liz will probably take home an average of $61,584.02.

Overall, male names reportedly made up the top 186 highest-value names on the list.

The other top-earning guy names were Bill, Geoff and Bob (I will point out that is our publisher’s first name), while rounding out the top-earning girl names were Jo, Michele and Alexis.

My initial reaction when I read about this research was, and I will quote myself directly: “I wish I’d heard about this 30 years ago.”

When I was a new parent, it never occurred to me that I could give my kids names that would help them rake in big bucks in the future.

No, what I did was persuade my wife, She Who Must Not Be Named, to let me give the kids names that I personally thought were “cool.”

Which is why my son ended up being named Liam, in honour of a fictional character named Liam Devlin, a lovable-but-deadly Irish rogue in a series of books by author Jack Higgins.

Whereas my daughter, Kayleigh, is named for a torch song by the neo-progressive British rock band Marillion, which contains the following heartfelt lyrics: “Kayleigh, oh I never thought I’d miss you/And Kayleigh I thought that we’d always be friends/We said our love would last forever/So how did it come to this bitter end?/Oh, yeah!”

For the record, I really like my kids’ names, but the point I am making today is that, while they are huge successes in their personal and professional lives, neither of them is currently on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s billionaires.

And that, I have come to understand, is entirely my fault, because I was guided by my heart, as opposed to the fortune-seeking regions of my brain, when I persuaded my wife to agree to the names I’d come up with.

Which brings me to my get-rich-slow plan.

As some of you Fortune 500 geniuses have already deduced, what I want to do, despite the fact that I am now60 years old and can barely tie my own shoelaces, is persuade my wife to have (please hold on for a moment or two here, while I do a bit of math)… another eight kids.

Then we will give each of them one of the names with the highest earning potential, at which point I plan to sit back in a reclining chair for several decades and — KA-CHING! — wait for the cash to start rolling in.

I realize there are certain drawbacks to this plan, such as the fact I will be roughly 90 before I would see a nickel from my sure-fire scheme.

On the other hand, I am not worried about competition from modern hipster parents, because they will be too busy wearing plaid shirts and drinking designer martinis and producing children with names such as Rainbow, Free and Unicorn.

If I’m going to be completely honest with you, I have not shared yet this plan with my wife.

But I’m confident she’ll understand the logic behind it. I know for a fact she likes babies, but getting her to name one of them “Ed” might take a little doing.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca