My journey to the graduation gift we are giving high school seniors this year took me a long time to get to. This graduation gift should actually start way before a kid graduates, but my husband and I are trying in our little way to give kids something I never had: Knowledge about handling money (click the picture above to see the gift we are giving them). My parents are amazing parents but one thing I did not grasp growing up was the value of money. My parents were great to us but in some ways it was detrimental to me. Anything I ever needed, or mainly anything I ever wanted, they got me. I’m sure there were times when they said no, but there are two moments that I think led me down a path that has taken me awhile to recover from. Now some people may have reacted differently to these two situations, so I know that my actions after these events are my own fault. But I am hopeful that parents out there might make a different choice than my parents did (Personally, we are with our children and if you want to know why I’m blogging about this on an elementary math blog just keep scrolling to the TMWYK section of this post).
Situation #1: My parents bought me cars. My first car was a hand me down from my mother. I got her old Subaru during high school when she was ready for a newer vehicle. Then my second car came from my dad’s promise that if I graduated college without getting married or pregnant he would buy me a car. So when I accomplished that they bought me a car again. At the time I thought both of those were great things. Looking back now, I see two problems. 1) I never felt the sting of working to save up and spend my hard earned money to buy a car. 2) Not working myself to purchase those vehicles made me value them less and not take care of them.
Situation #2: My parents paid off the credit card debt I accumulated during college. I remember the credit card booths in the main floor of my dorm the day I moved in. I signed up because I wanted the “free” t-shirt. Getting that free t-shirt was the catalyst to me racking up over $7000 in credit card debt during college. The bad part is I can’t even tell you what I spent it on….my guess is probably clothes and eating out. So when I graduated, my parents wanted to help me so they paid off my debt. The bad part was that I didn’t learn anything from that. By the time I married my husband six years later I had another $5000 in credit card debt. Them “helping” me did nothing but free me up to go spend more, because I didn’t have to worry about making those payments.
So I guess what I want parents to take away from this story is to stop helping your children. Instead, teach your children about money so that they can help themselves. We buy, buy, buy them whatever they want. We don’t want our kid to be the one who “goes without.” The best graduation gift you can give a child starts way before they graduate. Which brings me to the math part of this post; start Talking Math (and Money) With Your Kids from the time they are little.
TMWYK aka Talking Math With Your Kids
To avoid the two situations I described above, my husband and I have talked with our kids about our journey to become debt free in the hopes that they avoid it like the plague. The coolest thing about becoming debt free is that we will be set up to save for our kids’ futures instead of sending our money away in payments. As for the cars, our oldest (who is 6) already knows that we will match any money he saves from now until he is 16 to help him pay for his first car. This way we are still helping him out a little but he will feel the pain of his saved money leaving and going into the purchase of his vehicle. We will do this for all of our children, but he is the one who is already dreaming about his first truck.
One of the ways we TMWYK weekly is through the kids’ weekly commissions…they do not receive an allowance, they receive a commission; they work, they get paid. Their daily chores are kept up on the refridgerator and if they do their chores for the day they check off each one. At the end of the week they receive a quarter for each chore they have done during the week. The only video I have of that is from a few years back, you can watch it HERE, but my son quickly realized that every 4 chores equates to $1. I always give them their money in quarters to work on one-to-one correspondence but then they can exchange it if they want. My son ALWAYS exchanges, but my daughter, who is four, still thinks it is better to have 4 things (the quarters) instead of 1 thing (the dollar bill). When they get paid they decide (sometimes with our guidance) how much to Give, Save, and Spend. My son is really into the exchanging money so once he has 5 dollar bills he quickly wants a $5 bill. Then when he gets two $5, he trades me for $10, and so on. He has gotten money through his chores, birthdays, and his Nana and Papa pay really well when he helps around their house, so he has gotten to exchange for $20s, $50s, and $100s. It is amazing how fluent he is with not only counting money but thinking about the consequences of spending his money. You can watch him in these two videos, counting and thinking about spending money.
Take all the small moments you can to Talk Money With Your Kids so that you can build Money Smart Kids, not just Math Smart Kids.