He quickly resold them for over $1000. (And right now they’re reselling for over $4,000!)
Whether or not any of that makes sense at all, we used the experience talk about making, saving, and investing money. Our family talks a lot about money. The kids get an allowance, we share our family budget spreadsheet, and we shop carefully to compare prices and values.
Family is the first place most people learn about money. Indeed, a PolicyGenius survey found that 63% of parents have talked money with their kids.
To help busy parents teach their kids about money, we’ve curated a list of interactive, self-guided resources over on our blog.
What Resources Do You Recommend?
If you have a favorite book, app, video, or other tool for helping kids learn about money, please share it below. In this time of increased home teaching, your suggestions will be especially helpful!
Letting kids practice with money through an allowance is a great way to learn by actually doing. And through making their own mistakes with $10 at 10 years old instead of with $10,000 at age 20.
I have a family blog covering our approach to allowances. Happy to share but don’t want to break any rules around self promotion.
Thanks Edward. It looks like I cant include links, but if you go to cuttingthroughchaos dot com and then look for a post called ‘show me the money - part 3’, you’ll see a summary of our system and the good, the bad and the ugly from our first 6 months of implementing it.
Good question, @edward.
We’ve tried a bunch of things.
When I started working with Tiller, I was inspired to build a spreadsheet that administered a “virtual bank” for the kids. We still use it though, as our children have gotten older, we are slowly migrating to real-world banks. I wrote about our virtual bank three years ago here: http://kaboomllc.com/blog/chartering-a-virtual-bank-to-teach-saving-to-our-children/
More recently, we’ve put our 15-year-old daughter in charge of our family spending via our Tiller Money spreadsheet. In December, we mapped out our planned expenses for the year together, built a budget, and taught our daughter about our categories.
Day to day, she is in charge of categorizing our expenses, reporting to us at the end of each month, and helping us make corrections.
From a conceptual standpoint, this experiment has been a huge success. Our daughter has quickly learned the value of budgets, categorization & spreadsheets. She is learning what things in this world really cost and also how to plan spending and make adjustments. From a practical standpoint, there is still some room for improvement. Our daughter will check in on our spreadsheet with some prodding, but I often step in just because I’m curious and tired of reminding her.
I haven’t used this in years so I don’t know what state it is in, but hopefully you can get the gist from this copy, @rezaman. There are some scripts that add in the interest at the end of the month but I haven’t touched them in a while.