In order to make sure your kids really learn something, you have to teach it to them young. This is when they are the most impressionable, after all, and it’s when things are really going to stick in their brains. As a result, there are a few things you can do to make sure they get the idea and make good financial decisions in the future.
Creating Goals: Smarty Pig
One service that can be quite useful for teaching children about money is SmartyPig. This service is useful for anyone really, but it’s especially useful for children. It can help children learn the value of saving up their money and only buying something once they can properly afford it. The service works by allowing you to create goals for different things you want to buy. You can then put money into an account towards that goal, little by little.
These should be things beyond what you would buy normally, either because it is quite expensive, or because it will motivate you to get the money together more. The idea is that it will be more than you would have in the bank anyway, so it’s kind of like a free lunch. And the money can come from anywhere, including from just not buying things that you normally do buy, like extra cokes or anything like that.
There’s no better way to teach kids the importance of saving money than getting them to use a service like this to save money in service of a greater goal.
The Gravity of Loans
One critical thing to impart to children is the importance of considering loans carefully. There are a huge number of students these days who are getting into bigger and bigger loan debts without any hope of getting the jobs they will need to properly pay the debts off. But if you teach children early on that getting into debt from a loan is no small thing, then they will think twice about how they approach their college career later.
After all, it’s not like high interest loans are the only way to pay for a college education. You can always save up money before hand, or go with federal loans with better rates, or work hard to get proper scholarships and so on. This is one of the most important financial advice you could ever instill in children in the modern age.
Perseverance
A good lesson to teach your kids is that bad things happen sometimes, and to not get discouraged when they do. No matter how bad things get with credit, for example, there are always institutions that can help pull you out of the hole again. These services can help repair credit, for example. There’s always a solution for fixing the problem, you just have to be calm and rational enough to find it. This is something that it’s worth to instill in children at an early age so they won’t panic and make their financial situation worse.