Teach Kids to Set Financial Goals – Video

Here’s the next in my Kids and Money video series:  Setting Personal Financial Goals

The Mystery Charge – A Teachable Moment

The cell phone bill came in.  It was a little higher than usual, not by much, but enough to get me looking for the reason why.  I consider the cell phone bill a fixed expense.  Technically, it’s not since there is always the possibility that we could go over minutes at which point the charges [...]

How Does a 15-year old Save for a Car?

Ryan just bought a car. And she’s a beauty, too. 2002 baby blue Toyota Prius with only 57,000 miles. Owned by a 91-year old grannie who used it mostly to drive to church and back. No kidding. Problem is, Ryan can’t drive it; never mind he doesn’t have his license. He barely has his permit. [...]

How To Encourage Kids to Save Money

This is the first in a series of Kids and Money Quick Tips videos that I will be putting together. This first one is on getting kids in the habit of saving money.

The Other Literacy…Financial Literacy

We all know that literacy, the ability to read and write, is an important life skill.  It’s so important that we often create an environment at home to reflect this.  We start reading to our kids from an early age, years before they know how to read themselves.  We surround our kids with all kinds [...]

Personal Finance for Kids?

So it happened again to me today, and it’s happened enough that I decided to write about it…and solicit your help. I was chatting with a woman I just met about this, that, and the other, when, inevitably, the question so what do you do? comes up. She’s a stay-at-home mom, nice, and I told [...]

The Cell Phone: A Powerful Learning Tool

There was a huge graphic of a cell phone on the front page of the Sacramento Bee this morning. It was all about the love affair tweens and teens have with their cell phones confirmed in a study by Pew Internet and American Life Project. If you have a tween or teen, this is not [...]

Is It Worth It?

Ryan just spent $204.44. He didn’t do it lightly. That’s because he knows just how long it took him to earn that money. His one-day-a-week paper route earns him $11/week. That’s 19 weeks of folding and throwing papers. But he also gets $10/week in allowance. Enough to help him get some of the things he [...]

Spend to Make? But, of course!

I hung out in a second grade classroom last week to talk about saving money and then have the students make their own Money Jar.  It was a fun lesson and the Money Jars turned out unbelievable.  Kids and their creativity never ceases to amaze me. While we were discussing money issues, I asked the students [...]

$100 Jeans

I love watching commercials.  Especially with Ryan.  He wants to go into marketing as a career so it’s always fun to critique commercials with him. But last night, Ryan wasn’t with me while I had tuned in the Olympics so John got to hear me get annoyed at the t.v. instead.  It was a Tide commercial and a [...]