Money-Smart Kids

When I first started Freedom Sprout, I set out to read everything out there on children’s finances. I wanted to see what everyone was teaching, to see what I agreed with, what I didn’t (and why), what seemed like a great idea, and what seemed like nonsense.

Any time you can let someone else take the depreciation, you should. The fact is, wealthy people buy assets, poor people buy liabilities. To go a step further, poor people finance liabilities. If you have to finance it, you can’t afford it. That’s where buying used comes in.

If I was a marketing junkie, I would’ve posted this right before Christmas, but it’d be weird for me to spread awareness about marketing and advertising to kids, and then publish an article about buying toys—at Christmastime—to get you to buy more. This isn’t about consumerism, but if you’re buying toys, you might as well buy some toys that teach.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees” is a common saying, dating back to the 1800s. We all understand the meaning as, “you don’t just get money without working for it,” and we use it to teach this to our kids. The only issue is, this phrase doesn’t explain where money comes from, it only explains where it doesn’t come from.

As much as we try to teach our kids the right things, we need to take a step back and see what we can learn from them. Because, in our kids, we often see what naturally transpires.

The present is a product of all the “todays” before now. The future will be made of todays, and the only day you can live in is today. Well, would you look at that, it’s today again. As adults, we understand that our actions today will change, in a small way, the future, for the better or worse.