Teaching your child how money fits into life

When it comes to teaching kids about money, it goes deeper than anything you can find in a text book.  “Earn It, Learn It” author Alisa Weinstein explains in this kids and cash video.

Video from NBR

Transcript: Alisa Weinstein, author, “Earn it, learn it”:  I’m going to let you in on a little secret.  Financial literacy is not about the money.  It’s not really financial literacy at all.  It’s life literacy.  Cause just knowing how money works is not enough to guarantee we’ll be responsible with it.  It’s great to teach our kids how to save, how to spend, how to budget.  But these are just tools.  They’re facets of a really big picture. 

We can’t effectively teach kids financial literacy if we leave out how money fits into our lives.  And even though money’s about numbers, it’s not like teaching kids math because financial decisions aren’t black and white.  If they were, we’d all be perfectly financially responsible all the time.  I know I’m not.  Money’s tied into so many other things, like our health and our jobs and our partners, our age, our upbringing and it changes all the time. 
One plus one will always equal two, but what works financially one month may not the next. 

So when you’re talking with your kids, remember to teach more than just the tools.  Share a time you combined your responsibilities, values, ethics and emotions to make a financial decision.  Explain that they’ll one day use the same benchmarks to make other life decisions, too.  And that how we manage our money is only one piece of creating quality of life, a secret you’ll be quite happy to let out of the bag. 

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