Money Maxims To Teach Kids
Do you have children or teenagers in your life? Whether it’s your own children, nieces, nephews or cousins, it’s important to conduct yourself in a manner that reflects well on their nascent understanding of how money management works. Children are emotional and moral sponges. They take in and absorb everything they see and hear. Even if they are too young to comprehend the long-term significance of actions.
How you raise your children is your business. The point is that the advice, actions, and life lessons that are imparted to young people usually outlast us. Here are a few lessons about kids and money management that you might want to consider sharing.
Be A Good Financial Role Model
If you live from paycheck-to-paycheck and are always pinching pennies, children will learn to find such behavior normal. The worst thing you can do is to let children view the irresponsible use of credit cards as normal as well. Let children watch you budget the family finances. Help your kids learn about responsible monetary behavior as early as possible.
Compare Prices
Let your kids watch you shop. Make sure they understand the importance of comparison shopping. Explain to them the importance of finding the cheapest price for the products they need. According to recent statistics, the percentage of young people between the ages of 18 and 34 who routinely comparison shop online is about 75%. Let’s keep that percentage going up for the future. Make sure you also stress the importance of buying generic brands whenever possible as well.
Set an Age to Affirm Financial Self-Dependence
Open a bank account or school fund for your kids that they can’t touch until adulthood. Help your child develop age-centric milestone ambitions they can look forward to achieving – like buying their first car, renting their own apartment or buying their first house. Help them understand that after a certain age you won’t be financially supporting them anymore.
This is not out of cruelty, but out of love and concern that they become self-sufficient and able to take care of themselves. Parents don’t live forever. The advice, actions, and life lessons that you leave behind will outlive you. Don’t put your children in a situation where they begin to look for surrogates to take care of them after you cut them off. They should understand at a young age that they can expect to look after themselves financially. As adults.
Kids and Money: Understanding the Value of the Dollar
The various things that children see, hear and learn at their young ages add to the character of their being when they become adults. They are unto human clay, basically. Your actions and attitude help to mold who they become as adults. How you handle money, how you spend money and how you save money are learned attributes that they will pick up from you. Make sure they learn the value of money early, so they will employ those lessons throughout life.
Incidentially, if you’re reading this because you’re a parent and you’re interested in teaching your kids about personal finance, you might consider a couple of other blogs in addition to this one: www.kidsaintcheap.com and kidwealth.com. Kidsaintcheap.com is a bit older, and kidwealth is a new kid on the persona finance blog Both are good – check them out of you get a chance.
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Allen Francis is a full-time writer, prolific comic book investor and author of The Casual’s Guide: Why You Should Get Into Comic Book Investing. Allen holds a BA degree from Marymount Manhattan College. Before becoming a writer Allen was an academic advisor, librarian, and college adjunct for many years. Allen is an advocate of best personal financial practices including saving and investing in your own small business.
