Money and Values
My 20-year-old daughter earned a little money working as an intern for an engineering firm this summer. As she had to decide where to spend her hard-earned money, it was an exercise in clarifying her values while learning more about herself. She had no qualms about spending a sizable amount of money taking her little [...]
Making the most of your money
How to stretch our dollar, spend wisely, and use our money to live our strong family values.
Why I don’t give my kids an allowance
In this series on Teaching Children About Money, my practice is to maintain the primary control of money for my children while they are young. I don’t give allowances to my kids. I pay for everything they need and, within reasonable limits, just about everything they want. Both my parents and my husband’s parents raised [...]
The value of work
In the previous post, I talked about whether we should pay our children to do chores. I gave my take on it, which is not to say that it’s the perfect way to do it. The question now is, “If we don’t pay our children for regular chores, what about paying them for extra chores [...]
Should we pay our children to do chores?
(Read previous posts in this series: Teaching Children About Money, and Teaching Children to Set Priorities for Spending.) In the previous post, I posed the question “Should we pay our children to do chores to earn money?” Would that teach them lessons about money? Let me say that there is no perfect right or wrong [...]
Teaching children to set priorities for spending
As I mentioned in the last post, I don’t give my children allowances. There’s no right or wrong about allowances. We just chose not to. However, I started this year to give my 13-year-old daughter a small budget. She keeps track of the credits and debits in a check book register that I got from [...]
Teaching children about money
In previous generations, kids were expected to work for their own spending money, and even to contribute to the family’s needs. Later as parents, they, understandably, wish their children to have an easier life than they had by making it possible for their children not to have to labor as they did. Unfortunately, this has [...]
What do kids really need from us?
I love to read. I just finished reading a book that my sister recommended, Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah, a true story of her life. Adeline was born in the 30′s and grew up in an affluent family in China. Â As the youngest of five, their mother died after giving birth to Adeline. Carrying [...]
Making the world a better place
A year ago I wrote a post on 3 ways we can set an example to our children to make the world a better place. Now more than ever, in our current state of the economy where people are distressed about one thing or another, it is important for everyone of us to do our [...]
Teaching your children to budget for gifts
How do you help your children budget for Christmas gifts for their friends? What do you do when your children want to buy an expensive gift for a friend they don’t know that well? Is it ok to say, “You can’t spend that much on someone you don’t know that well.”? Does it sound like [...]