Teaching Your Kids How to Handle Money It is one thing to teach your kids how to start to make money. But it is equally…or perhaps more important to teach them what to do with their money once they have it. Very often parents wait until their kids are in their teens to start having their own money…and very few parents actually teach their kids how to save, spend, invest and give. Why would they…most parents are not doing that for themselves. Our education system does not include basic money management…they may learn how to count change, and add several items in a cart, but that does not go very far when they grow up and need to pay rent, groceries and the many other expenses we have in life. I started teaching money management when my kids were 2 and 4 years old. Yes perhaps they were too young to really understand what was happening…but the language of money and money management became as clear to them as how to walk and talk as they grew up and continued to handle and manage their own money. Many people that today are totally broke and heavily in debt, are not that way because they have not made enough money, but because they miss-managed or threw away so much of it. I have lived a huge financial roller coaster and have at many times had an abundance of cash available to me, and saw that as an opportunity to go on vacation or buy a new TV, never thinking that I could be setting some aside for the lean financial times. That pattern really started when I was a kid, I remember getting $5 from my dad and going to the corner store as quick as I could to spend every penny on candy. Unfortunately my spending habits never changed, the items I was spending on just got bigger and even worse, I was able to get my hands on credit cards so I was not just blowing the money I had in my hands, but going deep into debt with the “convenience“of credit cards. This is why it is critical to teach kids good money habits from the moment they start to experience money for themselves. I certainly do not blame my parents for my financial decisions. I do know however that much of what I learned to do was by watching my parents spend money. Today not only do our kids learn by observing their parents, but the media is a huge factor in our kids education. Unfortunately media is glorifying credit cards, buying for immediate gratification, getting loans to get what they want and do not pay for a year programs…a true recipe for financial debt. This was an excerpt from The Lemonade Stand and the Golden Pony by Gail Haynes To Learn more about the book due to be released in 2012 go to http://www.facebook.com/TheLemonadeStandAndTheGoldenPony
Gail DiamondTeaching Your Kids How to Handle Money