This is an intermittent series on the foibles and successes of teaching my kid about money.
Here’s the truth. I did a horrible job of teaching my child
about money. If you read "Telling the Truth", you know I’ve come to this
work because I teach what I needed to learn. And when my kid was young, I’d pay
her allowance sometimes, and then I wouldn’t. Sometimes it was because I
forgot; but sometimes it was because I didn’t have $10. Or I thought I didn’t.
And I never clarified what the allowance was for, because I had mixed feelings
about the purpose of an allowance. [Note: Big mistake! Always be clear about
what allowance is for. If it’s just because they’re a part of the family, be
clear about that too. Tell them why you’re giving them money, or what it is
they’re earning it for.] My mixed feelings led to vagueness and inconsistency.
I gave her young formative mind so many mixed messages about money; I did it
all wrong.
As she reached her teen years, I began feeling pressure to
make up for lost time. I needed to teach her as much as I could, as fast as I
could, to somehow make up for the years I didn’t have it together, and I needed
to do it before she left for college.
How do you teach a teenager about money? Imperfectly. I
started a few years ago by sharing our household spending plan. I’m sure she
glossed over the dull areas like Shelter and Transportation, but I’m also sure
she was the only kid in her class that knew exactly how much she had to spend
on clothes and entertainment every month. She knew that every July we’d lay low
on movies and art supplies, our typical entertainment expenditures, because our
fabulous State Fair was happening, an event that we happily spent the entire
months’ budget on.
I shared, but not too much. I began to weave in numbers
where appropriate “well, it’s the end of the month, so we only have $80 left in
our food budget for the month,” or “we haven’t been clothes shopping for a
while, so I think you have $105 to spend.” She didn’t always need to know the
numbers, but I think it made her feel a part of some of the mechanics of how
our household worked, financially. And where possible, I’d include her in
decisions. If we wanted extra money to buy more fun stuff at the State Fair, we
made a joint decision about how much to borrow from September’s entertainment
budget.
And, if she learned nothing else from my proactively sharing
our household spending plan, she learned that it’s ok to talk about money. That
it’s just a normal conversation; a part of everyday life.
Stay tuned for Part II - Coming August 15
- Stacey Powell
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