Article: 9 ways to make your kids smarter about money

AprilZ81 · June 2015

Article Link

This was on Yahoo this morning and I found it kind of interesting. I think the author goes a little bit overboard, I don't think we need to make every family discussion about money, but there are some good ideas there.

CuriousKiddosMama · June 2015

It seems overboard to me too, although I just skimmed the article. I'm not going to be sharing credit card statements with my kids, or discussing why things cost $3.99 as opposed to $4. Or where the $ for their dance classe scome from, that is overboard. I do however want to make sure my kids have an understanding of what things cost. That if you want to live in a house like this it costs x every month, or the cell phone cost this every month, and how many hours does that take to get?
I want to make sure to have these conversations with my kids, so they have a good understanding of money. Any talks with your kids about money are important in my book. It's amazing that parents forget this sometime. A couple years ago I was tutoring a student who was very sheltered from this type of stuff. One of the assignments he got from math class was to create a monthly budget based on the salary of a job he wanted. This kid didn't know what anything cost, and it was a very eye opening conversation. His home was probably around 800k, and he thought he could continue living the way his parents did by working at a retail store part time after school was out because he didn't want to work too hard like his parents did. I had him go ask his dad what the mortgage was, and then we discussed where he would actually be living if he wanted to just work part time retail and take it easy. I think he understood a bit better why his parents wanted him to get his grades up, and go to college to get a career after that. At the very least he tried a bit harder at the rest of our tutoring sessions

Mustard76 · June 2015

I love these ideas. My parents never talked with us about money. At least not their money. We each received an allowance, and when we started working, my dad reviewed pay stubs, and we had to save 50% of our earnings. He held onto that 50%, and that was used for my college tuition. That was really helpful when it came to paying my tuition bill, but I didn't learn anything about mortgages, credit, savings, etc. I think it would be really valuable to have any conversation about real money. Not just the $6/hour I was earning at the grocery store bakery. While I learned the value of hard work, and working is how you earn money to pay for things, I think there is so much more to the ins and outs of money.

That said, I don't know that we'll ever have kids, so far be it for me to tell someone how to raise their children. But, I do think we need to do a better job of teaching personal finance as a whole. Now that I work in the finance industry, it blows my mind how many people don't understand or value money, or most of all, their ability to earn a wage.

TravelJunkie1234 · June 2015

Interesting article, I think it brings up some good ideas (I do think some are a little overkill though).

@CuriousKiddosMama, as much as I hate to say it your student sounds like me as a kid, lol. I had 0 knowledge of money--I never got an allowance, and for the most part if I wanted something as a kid, I just asked and got it. When I was 16 I got a new car "just because" (dad didn't even tell my mom he was buying it for me, so as you can see money conversations just didn't happen in my family), there was no talk about financials, or paying for insurance or anything. When I got my first job at age 20 (part-time while going to school--much against the will of my parents) I was encouraged by my mom to get credit cards and continue living the same lifestyle as my parents, which got me about $10,000 into debt.

Sadly I see my baby brother going through the same thing and I've tried my best to teach him some financial sense so he doesn't make the same mistakes I did.

brij2006 · June 2015

It's definitely an interesting article. It's something that I wish parents would be more open with their kids about, but money is such a taboo topic to people that it just doesn't happen.

Although, I definitely won't be showing my kid our bank statements or how much we paid for our house. Those are things they just don't need to know until they're much, much older. My parents didn't tell me anything at all though. I had no clue what I was getting into when I moved out on my own at 18. Thankfully my H had already moved out, so I was able to ask him what expenses I would be looking at. So I will definitely discuss those types of things with them.

We also plan to not give an allowance, but rather a commission. You earn X amount of money for certain tasks. We don't want our kids getting an allowance, because we don't want them to think money just appears for nothing. But also teach them that harder jobs make more money.

AprilZ81 · June 2015

brij2006 said:

It's definitely an interesting article. It's something that I wish parents would be more open with their kids about, but money is such a taboo topic to people that it just doesn't happen.

Although, I definitely won't be showing my kid our bank statements or how much we paid for our house. Those are things they just don't need to know until they're much, much older. My parents didn't tell me anything at all though. I had no clue what I was getting into when I moved out on my own at 18. Thankfully my H had already moved out, so I was able to ask him what expenses I would be looking at. So I will definitely discuss those types of things with them.
We also plan to not give an allowance, but rather a commission. You earn X amount of money for certain tasks. We don't want our kids getting an allowance, because we don't want them to think money just appears for nothing. But also teach them that harder jobs make more money.

I would like to do something similar with our kids when they are old enough. They will get a "base pay" for doing a set amount of chores and a "commission" for doing additional work with approval from the "boss" when they want more money. I also want them to work towards big ticket items like gaming systems and smart phones. They need to save up half and then we will pay the other half. It will teach them how much something costs, how to save money for a goal and then (hopefully) the added bonus of being more careful with their stuff since if it breaks they lose their investment.

blondie42107 · June 2015

I think talking money with children is important however I have no interest in talking about a credit card statement, etc with my 4 year old. What we do talk about is that mom and dad have money in the bank, when you use a plastic debit card, money comes out of our account and pays for what we buy. We also talk about needs verses wants. We talk about what's on sale. At the end of May my kiddos were asking for pizza from a local place. H and I simply said we couldn't order pizza that night because we didn't have money for it. My 4 year old asked if we were all out of money for everything and we simply said no, that we budget to pay for food, our house, heat/air/water, etc. He asked a few questions and got the point that pizza isn't that important and if mom and dad didn't have room in the eating out budget, it wasn't going to happen.

AprilZ81 · June 2015

The author didn't even touch having age appropriate discussions. What a 4 year old understands and what a 12 year old understands is vastly different.

lifeonthehill · June 2015

The dance class comment was overkill in my mind. I think my parent reminding me about how much money I was costing him every time I announced I enjoyed something would make me feel guilty to the point of no longer attending the activity honestly. I don't mind sharing the bills to show them how it all works when they are mature enough but not every month. What if something huge happens and we have to charge a big bill? I wouldn't want to put that on my kids shoulders.

I grew up in therapy/medicated for anxiety. By the time I was 13 I was struggling with depression. I think them sharing hard financial times would have put me over the edge.

Article: 9 ways to make your kids smarter about money

Re: Article: 9 ways to make your kids smarter about money

Choose Another Board

Search Boards