But that doesn’t mean they are irrelevant. Lessons for kids regarding money are timeless. Sure, economies change. The size of your savings account changes. And your kids grow up – and change. But the lessons don’t change much.

So come on in. Look around. Use the masthead to your right to look for topics that will be helpful to you in teaching your kids about money. Follow timelines of stories. See the progress. And how our experiences can help you.

We have a lot going on in our family. Lots of recent money lessons learned. And given.

I will try to get some more stories up shortly.

Justine

One motivation for having a credit card for my kids is that is how the kids gets his or her clothing allowance. By the time the kid gets to the age of twelve, I just don’t buy their clothes any more. The kid is in charge of buying his own clothes. This is how I teach my children how to budget and make sure that I don’t overspend on my kids’ clothing and make sure that I don’t buy too much more for one kid than I do for another. It’s easier for ME to keep track of what we are spending if THEY have to keep track of what THEY are spending.

So the kids have clothing allowance. I will throw out some numbers for you. I always hesitate to provide actual figures, because people want to argue about numbers. But I provide numbers just to give food for thought. For you to decide how you want to manage this in your family.

Hannah has a monthly clothing allowance of $110. Jonathan has a monthly clothing allowance of $60. Max doesn’t yet have a clothing allowance. I generally start my kids with a monthly allowance of $60, which is, what, $720 a year? I dunno, that number has just seems to work for us.

Jon is still at $60 and seems to be fine with it. Hannah outgrew $60 a long time ago so we raised her. She asked for a raise and we all negotiated and that is where she has been for a while, a couple of years. Jon hasn’t asked for a raise, but now that he is 15 years old, I am expecting a request soon.

More later.

Justine

OK, I don’t know where I got this quote. And I apologize for that. I found it way down in my pile of things to do for this blog. If it is yours, please let me know.

But, yeah. Do your kids know how much your healthcare costs? Do you have health insurance? Do they know that you do or don’t? Do they know what it costs you to go to the doctor each time? Do they know what it costs your insurance company each time you go to the doctor? DO YOU?

This is a great discussion to have with your kids. And a great thing to teach them. Especially in light of the discussions we have been having in this country over the past year. It’s important to prepare our kids for adulthood by teaching them about the cost of healthcare. And to help them get smart so that they, as a generation, can find new, innovative solutions for our country.

Justine

“Just read your blog post and really appreciated it.  I have made so many financial mistakes in my 32 (almost 33) years, that it is ridiculous.  I think its fantastic that you are teaching your kids, explaining to them and also letting them live with their mistakes so that they can learn when they can’t do too much damage!

“When you mentioned that Hannah is going to close her credit card before she goes to France it reminded me of a couple of mistakes that I made and thought I would share.  One thought is that I believe it is important to your long term credit to build up as much history as possible and wonder if it would be more beneficial to keep the card open but leave it in the US?

“Two other lessons I learned back in the day: (1) If there is a balance on the card when you close it, it is a negative ding on your score – minor, but still a ding.  (2) I was diligently paying down my credit card balances and I would call the credit card company every time I had paid down another $500, $1000 (or whatever chunk) and ask them to lower my credit limit.  I thought I was being responsible, but what I was doing was keeping my debt to available credit at 98%.  Not good!

“Keep the blog coming!”

Sue

Wonderful husband called the bank and went online to check the accounts. And he figured out that it was a problem with our daughter’s checking account. But because he is not on the account, he couldn’t get to the bottom of it. And good thing, since that is clearly my daughter’s responsibility.

I spoke to my daughter when she got home and told her there was a problem with the bank and she needed to call and find out what was going on. You all know that this is one of the greatest benefits of teaching kids to manage their money – they also learn to make phone calls and interact with customer service representatives which is not always an easy or comfortable process. I think that this is an important skill to teach our kids before they leave our homes and move on to adulthood.

My daughter called and found out that she had bounced a check. The Friendly Bank paid the check for her anyway, because of our family’s solid relationship with this smaller, local bank. But she needed to make the bank whole and she also needed to pay the charge of $25 which the bank charged for the service.

The first question my daughter and I asked each other was, “How did you bounce a check?” We both are to blame. I realize that I have NOT trained my daughter well in matters related to checking accounts. And she has not taken all of the responsibility she should in managing her account.

You, dear readers, will benefit from this lesson over the next few blog posts. We will get into checking accounts and how to teach them to your kids. It’s one of the later lessons in teaching your kids about personal finance.

More to come.

Justine

And because of that, we need to get our lessons completed in a finite amount of time. We, as parents, are required to teach our children all kind of matters about money before our children march out of the house to be responsible adults who will contribute to our vast world.

My three kids are a senior in high school, a freshman in high school and a seventh-grader, respectively. And because of that, the lessons that I am teaching them have evolved. But still, they are different for each child.

For Hannah, my senior in high school, who will leave my house in a mere nine months, the lessons are about putting the finishing touches on all that I have taught her. And they are about sitting on the sidelines and just being a coach and an advisor. There is little you can teach a senior in high school. They are done listening. They are on that bridge to adulthood and leaving their parents behind.

For Jon, my freshman in high school, we are really moving into ‘big people personal finance.’ He has mastered his credit card. It’s time to start learning about checking accounts and really earning money and saving for college.

For Max, my seventh grader, it’s about finishing off some of the money lessons of childhood and trying to transition him to the idea of credit cards and really earning money and having all of these lessons start jelling in his head.

As parents, we must be flexible and creative and progressive in how we teach our children about money. We need to be cognizant of each of their ages and places in childhood and how much time has passed and how much time we have remaining in their childhoods as we administer our lessons.

Justine

And I have encountered men who were so grateful to have some work on a Saturday morning that they seemed like young, energetic dogs, prancing around on their front legs, waiting for their next instructions.

I see all of these people and I realize, remind myself, that these people are each a priceless, loving human being.

And I then remember to teach this to my children. Over and over.

I teach my children that one’s financial position does not determine their worth. Although in this country, it seems that that is certainly the case much of the time. I teach my children that the working poor and the homeless did not intentionally get themselves there, typically, but they often have issues or problems that got them there. And I expose my children to folks like this on a regular basis so that they can learn this for themselves.

I teach my children that the wealthy also did not intentionally get themselves there, typically. Many of the wealthy our family knows have inherited their money or they just fell into exceptionally high-paying jobs. Yes, they worked hard. But not any harder than the moving guys who are grateful to have the work.

I also teach my children that they, particularly because they are Americans, have the opportunity to be any of these people, the Whiny Rich or the Working Poor, and could very easily. My children’s financial situation in the future will result from luck and hard work, but will also be shaped by the effects of structural violence and bigotry and economic cycles and how risks that they take play out.

Which is why they need to learn all about money. So that they can manage well whatever they earn or achieve.

Justine

I have two boys, thirty months apart in age, who nearly look like twins. It’s funny. But they couldn’t be more different.

Jon, my elder son, has a credit card and a mobile phone and manages both of them pretty well. This month, at least, he is a straight A student. He is affable and sweet and compassionate and generous. He has a wide worldly view and his empathy can be astounding.

And then there is Max. Max is my younger son. He is sweet and charming and devious and cunning and brilliant and a very good liar. As his mother, I love all those things about him. I have to.

But Max is also pretty immature for his age of twelve and a half years old. In my opinion, relative to my other kids and kids his age.

I tell you this because Max just isn’t on the same learning track as my other two kids when it comes to money. We’ve already learned a lot about Max. We gave him a mobile phone when he entered the sixth grade, in middle school, as we had done with our two older children. But Max never used the phone and it just sat in his room. So we just let it fall away. Based on that, we haven’t helped Max get a credit card. He just doesn’t seem interested, and frankly, I think he is going to be more of a challenge with a credit card than my other two kids.

In fact, now that I think about it, our son, Max, owes his dad about $400 in charges from iTunes that he made with his iTunes account. We’ve shut that account down and are dealing with this latest issue.

Just because I write a blog about Parents Teaching Kids About Money doesn’t mean I have all the answers. Or that my kids are all great at this. But hopefully, that makes me a more credible and authentic teacher and counselor to you, my readers.

Justine

It was a pretty smooth affair. Jon has a credit card and has been practicing with it for three years now. Jon is really pretty good at using his credit card. There are new things still to learn and he still makes a mistake or two. But by the time he leaves the confines of my house in four years, he will really understand credit cards and personal finance and will be ready to be an adult out in that big, bad world.

The biggest hassle Jon encountered was finding the correct pizza store that would deliver to our address. Once he found that, he ordered the pizza and paid with his credit card. Easy for him these days.

Soon, the doorbell rang. No one else seemed to be getting the door, so I answered it. I asked the delivery guy if the order was on a credit card and he said it was and handed me the receipt to sign. I commented that it was cool that my fourteen-year-old son ordered the pizza by himself and paid with his credit card. “Don’t you think that is cool?”

The delivery guy, a young man in his twenties, replied, “He has a credit card? Wow, I only have a debit card. I don’t trust myself with a credit card.” I responded that that is why I am teaching my kids how to use credit cards – so that they aren’t afraid of them and that they can deploy the power of them, safely. Pizza guy nodded his head, raising his eyebrows in affirmation.

I gave the guy a nice tip, took my receipt and took the pizzas inside.

I gave the receipt to Jon. It’s his. Not mine.

Justine

Jon wanted a little clarification. He wanted to know if it would be OK to call Papa John’s as the vendor. Jon’s dad and I don’t really care for Papa John’s and we would rather support locally owned establishments, but those establishments don’t deliver. And we wanted no hassles that night – we didn’t even want to drive to get the pizza. Papa John’s delivers.

So we told Jon that he could order from Papa John’s. He then wanted to clarify the types of pizzas he should order. He suggested our ‘regulars’ and we were just fine with that.

We didn’t see Jon again for a while. He took the wireless phone from the kitchen land line, even though he has a mobile phone, and went about the business of ordering a pizza. A bit later, Jon showed back up in the kitchen, telling us about his exploits. Since he has a credit card, it wasn’t hard to ORDER the pizza. The hard part, apparently, was find the correct Papa John’s to order from. He found a phone number of “Papa John’s” but once he got through, he was told that that particular store wouldn’t deliver to our address.

Jon persevered, finally finding the right store. I don’t know how he did it. I am just glad he went through the exercise. He learned how to find a pizza joint. And he learned how screwed up businesses are sometimes, where they don’t seem to want your business. And he learned a lesson that will help him learn to be a great entrepreneur or business man one day when he invents a better mousetrap.

More to come.

Justine