Teaching your Kids About Money – 5 Simple Tips
Written by admin on December 6th, 2010You may get a surprise answer when you tell your kids that you have no money to buy something, they probably will tell you to charge on your credit card. For most of kids, money is for spending. Kids have this miss interpretation about money because most of us do not start talking about money with our children early enough. Kids need to understand more about money, they need to learn up the value of saving and investing, and it’s not just for spending.
So, how to get start to teach your kids about the value of money? It is never too early for your kids to learn about the value of money and how to budget and save. To make thing simple, here are 10 simple ways which will help you to educate your children about personal finance and managing money:
1. As soon as children can count, introduce them to money.
Take an active role in providing them with information about money. Take whatever opportunities come up to teach kids about money. Take them grocery shopping and encourage them to read the prices and explain to them why you want to buy things on sales and why you shop at a discount store & etc. Observation and repetition are two important ways children learn. So, you take whatever opportunities come to teach you kids about money and let them learn over and over again.
2. Learning by example
Teaching children about money does not mean sitting them down every Saturday morning to a lecture on the vagaries of stock markets. In the main it means including them in the daily running of the household. This includes involving them in planning the household budget, explaining the differences between needs and wants, telling them why you have life assurance, and why you need a retirement plan. You also need to set a good example by creating a spending plan with your family. Show to your kids that setting up a budget doesn’t have to be complicated.
3. Give Your Kids Allowance
Most experts agree that giving kids an allowance helps them to build money awareness. It’s better to make mistakes at 13 with than at 33 with ,000. The experts recommend giving a dollar amount to match their ages. So a 10-year-old kid would get and so one. This is money just for being part of the family and taking care of basics, such as picking up toys, making beds and not leaving towels on the bathroom floor. Give kids total control over how they spend their allowance. The whole point is to let them learn from their mistakes.
4. Create opportunities for your kid to earn money
Create opportunities for older children to earn additional money with jobs such as washing the car and mowing the lawn. This is the time to instill appreciation for a job well done and getting paid for your efforts. Teach them that they can get what they want through hard work, not because they are entitled to it.
5. Teach them about budgeting & credit card
Before your teenagers heads off for college, they need to learn before hand on budgeting and credit card which will help them to avoid plastic problems. College’s teenagers are the most favorate market for credit card companies. College’s teenagers will start to get preapproved credit card applications in mail and email. You may want your kids to go off to school with a debt card intead of credit card. So that they can’t spend more than what they go in their account.
In Summary
Kids need to understand about money and how you get it into your hands as adults. Take whatever opportunities come up to teach your kids about money so that they understand that money is not just for spending and the consequences of over uses of money by withdrawing cash advance and charge everything to credit card can lead them to trap into financial crisis.