National Bank of MomDuring his years in elementary school, J packed his lunch almost every day. When he started middle school a few months ago, he wanted to buy; apparently the food was THE BEST EVER.
We started putting money on his lunch account but found it going really fast — and honestly it’s because we weren’t paying attention.
It’s been a few years that I’ve been working with my son on personal finance. Like with other aspects of life, things have gotten a bit complicated.
Maybe you’ve experienced this with your own finances — you put different processes in place and over time, you can’t remember how the whole process works and are afraid to touch any one thing.
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.
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.
Awhile back I wrote about being bad with money. My argument was that no one is bad with money — if you want to learn and get better, you CAN do it.
Today I want to talk about something similar — being bad at math.
Think about this — if you believe that you don’t like or aren’t good at math, what are the chances you’ll like and be good at personal finance?
And the same with your kids. If they hear you say this or worse, they say it themselves, how likely is it that they’ll be rockstars with their money later in life? I’d say slim.
Here are three questions to consider.
