Children and Money: Tips for Teaching Your Kids about Financial Responsibility

Children and Money: Tips for Teaching Your Kids about Financial Responsibility
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Tips for Parents

Encourage kids to find a summer job. Feeling responsible about making their own money may make kids less likely to spend it all in one place. They may also be more likely to think about their purchases if they made the money themselves.

Start an online savings account. Online banking allows kids to learn to save by learning about the best savings account plans, what compound interest means and more.

Hold a family garage sale. Getting a family sale together is hard work. It requires many organizational skills and helps kids deal with money up close and personal. To make things more interesting, offer to give kids a percentage of the money made provided if they work to achieve it so they can see the fruit of their efforts.

Give kids an allowance based on their level of involvement in family jobs. You can correlate their level of activity to the money they receive, basing their allowances on the amount of work they do. This will teach them the value of money more and help them realize that money doesn’t grow on trees and is a result of hard work.

Have kids come along for the ride on family shopping trips. Helping with grocery shopping and other types of shopping chores allows them to see how much it costs to maintain a home and living expenses. This will help kids understand the value of a dollar.

Money Apps for Kids

Below is a short list of helpful financial and money apps for kids to further their education regarding money skills and economic knowledge.

  • Motion Math: Pizza - This app teaches all of the basic mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This real world simulation of a pizza restaurant where players determine the prices they will pay for various items provides realistic context. They are required to rush the orders to customers and accept their money.
  • Keep the Change - Geared toward younger kids who are just learning literal values of money, this app for iPhone and iPad teaches kids the value of various coins.
  • Virtual Piggy - This app teaches kids to save and donate money to charities as well as disperse their funds in various places as they will do in the real world.
  • Allowance - This app allows you to pay your kids paid according to work they do in the form of family chores.

These tips and apps are just a few practical ideas for parents that you can implement with your kids on a regular basis that may help them understand the value of a dollar, how to use money without wasting it, how to allocate money to different purposes and other aspects of savings.

Combining practical tips with entertaining apps may help you instill a sense of responsibility for money in kids of all ages in ways that they understand.

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