Teaching financial concepts to children is best done in alignment with their learning style. For a few years now, we had only been using a spreadsheet to show my youngest son how to track his money into the categories of: Sharing, Investing, Saving and Spending (SISS).
The problem was it wasn’t really working. He would burn through his money so quickly and we couldn’t figure out how to break him of the habit.
Finally, at Christmas I decided to make things more tangible for him and helped him turn containers from his stocking loot into “4 Jars” for splitting his money into. For the last two months he has split his money up every week and has set aside nearly $15 in each of the 4 jars. That’s quite a bit of money for a Little Man who used to buy a Little Cesar’s pizza every time he had $6.45 in his account. He’s spent a bit of money on candy grams for a couple of friends and almost has enough in his Spend Jar to buy a new game for the Xbox Kinect he saved for and purchased several months ago. Making the financial education match his learning style of visual/kinesthetic has really paid off.
How are you teaching your children about money?
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