Teaching Your Children to Save: Part Two
One night a week we meet together as a family. We put everything away and have family activities. We will talk about important things to the family. We will have a time where we talk about our religion. We will even sing songs and read together. My favorite part is the dessert at the end. It is our boding time. We do this on Monday nights in our house.
I have been thinking about an incident with my boy this morning. The elementary school he goes to has a vending machine in the hallway. This vending machine has pencils, erasers and small books. Whenever I go an eat lunch with my children I buy them something out of the vending machine. Today my boy took a dollar out of my wallet and wanted to buy something. He couldn’t grasp the concept that the dollar wasn’t his even though he wanted something from the machine. He threw a tantrum all the way to school. I was not pleased and wanted him to learn a lesson. I thought about it today and came up with our activity for tonight’s family night.
I took out my big jar of change and set it before them. The children wanted to take all the money. It was a challenge to keep their hands out of the jar. I told them we were going to create rules for earning and spending money.
I started off with giving 10 pennies to each child. We then set up four rules for them to follow for spending money. Here are the four rules.
Rule #1: 1 out of every 10 coins must go to charity. In our house, we give it to our church. The concept is that the first 10% must always go to someone else. It could be for a Charity the entire family decides. It could go to help a neighbor. It could go to your religion.
Rule #2: 2 out of every 10 coins must go to college. Education is very important in our house. I do not believe that education will solve all of your problems. I believe it gives you more opportunities. So in our house you must save for college.
Rule #3: 2 out of every 10 coins must go to marriage. This is really the beginning of their retirement fund I want to help them create. I want them to learn that, when they get married, it needs to be base upon solid principles. I believe that a lot of fights in marriages have to deal with finances.
Rule #4: 5 out of every 10 coins must be spent. The kids loved this one more than anything because I added a stipulation to it. The stipulation was that mom and dad could not say a word on how they wanted to spend the money. If they wanted to buy more fish, they could. If they wanted to buy me an ice cream cone, they could. Whatever they wanted to do was up to them. This got them so excited.
I got out three envelopes and put their name and the rule on it (rules 1 through 3). I also got out their piggy bank, which holds the money they can spend. They put the pennies they had and put them in the right envelopes. They then put their spending money in the piggy banks. We then did the same thing for nickels. We then did the same thing for dimes. We did this enough times so that they remembered how much went to each one. Once a month we will go as a family to the bank and they will give their money to the teller and deposit their money into their education and marriage accounts. I want them to remember putting their money into their accounts for their life.
I sometimes have a hard time connecting with my children. I feel that even though we talk it is like I am from outer space and they can’t understand me. Tonight was a night where we connected and they learned more about saving. You too can find those ways to connect to them and teach them about principles you feel are important.
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