3 Ways To Teach Your Kids About Money
There are a lot of things that your kids can learn at school but curriculums are often lacking in applicable real world skills. The biggest gap is usually money management and a lot of kids enter adulthood completely unprepared to handle their money and that can land them in some sticky situations. It falls to you to teach your kids about the value of money and how to be sensible with it. If you’re homeschooling, you get choice over the curriculum so there’s more opportunity for teaching kids about money. It can be hard for parents sometimes and lecturing your kids on it isn’t the way to get through to them. When it comes time to teach your kids about money, here are some of the best ways to do it.
Start Investments For Them
Encouraging your kids to start saving and investing from a young age is one of the best ways to make sure that they are financially secure when they get older. You should start setting up some investments for them now and getting them to help you manage them. If you’re not an investment expert yourself and you’re worried about the danger of losing your money, there is help available. A lot of people are using robo-investors these days which are programs that analyse market trends and help you make informed decisions about your investments. The two main ones are Personal Capital and Betterment. Both have their own pros and cons so you should check out this Personal Capital vs Betterment comparison to work out which is best for your investments. By getting your kids to help out with investments, you can start building some savings for their future and teaching them the skills they need to handle their own money when they’re adults.
Give Them Money
The easiest way to teach kids how to handle money is to give them some and let them learn from their own mistakes. If you start giving them a weekly allowance and give them the freedom to spend it however they like, they’ll soon learn to be careful with money. The first few weeks they’ll probably spend it all right away but then when they see something that they want to buy later in the week and they’ve got no money left to buy it, they’ll soon realize the importance of budgeting. Those transferable skills will serve them well when they grow up and have to start budgeting for bills etc.
Show Them Your Finances
Parents are often reluctant to talk to their kids about how much they earn and how much they spend on bills every month but involving your kids in that is actually a good way of teaching them fiscal responsibility. If they have no sense of how much money things cost, they’ll blow their first paycheck without realizing that they’re going to end up in financial trouble. If you show them how much you earn and what percentage of that is going on bills and food, they’ll be better prepared when they start having to make financial decisions for themselves.
If you don’t start teaching your kids this stuff now, they’ll be completely unprepared for adult life.