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Real-life money lessons

Teach your kids to give back this holiday season

The holidays are a great opportunity to teach your kids about giving back. Whether items, money or time, giving to those less fortunate not only helps them but it feels good.

Think about what’s important to your family and how you can make an impact this holiday season.

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Real-life money lessons

Yes, your 11 year old can learn to budget

For over a year, our family has been using FamZoo. Now that my kiddo is starting middle school, I felt it was a good time to introduce budgeting. (Okay, actually I was really excited!)

I started with a paper budget that had five categories. That lasted for all of a hot second before we ran out of space — even kids need more than five categories.

Enter YNAB. I’ve used it for years (you’ve heard me love on it before) — why not have J give it a shot? It also seemed like a good time because he could use the YNAB app on his new cell phone.

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Real-life money lessons

How to Give Your Middle-Schooler Additional Freedom in Making Money-Related Decisions

Last week, J and I had a conversation about what else he would like to learn about money. He’s going to middle school in the fall and I mentioned it would be a great opportunity to give him some extra responsibilities.

We talked about how additional responsibilities will actually give him more of a chance to make decisions on his own, better known as freedom. So he suggested I use the word freedom in the title because freedom sounds better than responsibility.

We brainstormed some possibilities and came up with the items below.

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Spend wisely

The Best Christmas Gift for Kids

It’s not Christmas yet, but we’re getting ready! Last time, we talked about budgeting for Christmas gifts and today I want to talk about our favorite present from Santa EVER. In fact, it’s so cool that we still use it (two years later!).

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Real-life money lessons

Budgeting for Christmas Gifts

In one of my very first posts, I shared a short-term savings plan for Christmas gifts. Kids can totally learn to save for Christmas gifts and purchase them by themselves. I’ve found that it makes J feel good to save the money, think of thoughtful gifts, make the purchase and wrap gifts on his own.

Because we’re using FamZoo cards now, we decided to utilize both the budget and additional account features for J’s yearly Christmas gifts list.