Kids & Money

You should be able to find several indispensable facts about Kids & Money in the following paragraphs. If there's at least one fact you didn't know before, imagine the difference it might make.

It seems like new information is discovered about something every day. And the topic of Kids & Money is no exception. Keep reading to get more fresh news about Kids & Money.

The article below is from CNNMoney.com.

Top things to know

1. When it comes to teaching kids about money, the sooner the better.
Up until they start earning a living, and sometimes well beyond that, kids are apt to spend money like it grows on trees. This lesson will help you put your children on the road to handling money responsibly.

Long before most children can add or subtract, they become aware of the concept of money. Any four-year-old knows where their parents get money -- the ATM, of course. Understanding that parents must work for their money requires a more mature mind, and even then, the learning process has its wrinkles. For example, once he came to understand that his father worked for a living, a five-year-old asked, "How was work today?" "Fine," the father replied. The child then asked, "Did you get the money?"

2. Once they learn how money works, children often display an instinctive conservatism.
Instant gratification aside, once they learn they can buy things they want with money -- e.g., candy, toys -- many children will begin hoarding every nickel they can get their hands on. How this urge is channeled can determine what kind of financial manager your child will be as an adult.

3. Seeds planted early bear fruit later.
It's important to work on your child's financial awareness early on, for once they're teenagers, they are less likely to heed your sage advice. Besides, they're busy doing other things -- like spending money.

4. An allowance can be an effective teaching tool.
When your kids are young, giving them small amounts of money helps them prepare for the day when the numbers will get bigger.

5. Teenagers and college-age kids have bigger responsibilities.
Checking accounts, credit cards, and debt are as elemental to the college experience as books and keg parties. Teaching high-schoolers about banking and credit will make them more savvy when they leave the nest.

6. Even investing should be learned early.
High schoolers can and should be taught about the market -- using real money.


This is a short video on Kids & Money

Plan For Wealth

Most of us think that wealth will come naturally, so why need financial planning. In my opinion and also reading some article, we need to count our money and make them grow. This means that we need to consciously plan to grow our wealth. Below article will tell you more about this.

Plan For Wealth

One very important wealth creating habit is to set up a concrete plan that you can actually follow. You see, wealth takes planning, and is usually the result of taking a set of orderly, progressive steps from where you are now to where you want to be financially.

Why is this a top wealth creating habit? Because the most extraordinarily wealthy people on the world did it this way. Less than 7% of the wealthiest people in the world received an inheritance, and of those 7%, almost none received their total wealth that way. In other words, almost everyone has to have a step-by-step plan for achieving wealth. The "I hope I win the lottery" works for almost no one.

While a complete financial plan can be difficult to create overnight, you can get started by practicing creating concrete financial goals. And we do mean concrete. When most of us think about our financial situation, we tend to recoil from it because it makes us uncomfortable, especially if we are in debt or we are not as far along as we want to be. Stop recoiling! Take a careful look at your financial situation and set 1 to 3 goals that you want to achieve.

Write these goals in concrete detail. For instance, don't write a vague statement like "Pay off debt." Instead, write a more detailed statement such as, "Reduce debt 10% by December 31, 2004." This kind of goal gives you lots to work with. For instance, if you want to reduce your debt 10% by the end of the year, you'll have to consider:

• How to reduce expenses to stop accumulating more debt, and save money to pay off debt.
• How to increase income, if possible, to pay off the debt.
• What assets you might be able to sell to pay off debt.

Do you see how a concrete goal gives you a way to think logically rather than emotionally about your money? Ten percent of your debt is a solid number against which you can make real calculations and real life changes. For each goal, list the obstacles you have to overcome and make a step-by-step plan for overcoming those obstacles. And we do mean "1, 2, 3?"

For instance, in the above example, if the main obstacle is your spending habits, step 1 might be to list all the possible ways to reduce expenses. In step 2, you might list all the ways you might increase your income or the assets you could sell. If you have a significant other, step 3 might be to sit down and discuss the situation with him or her. Together you can work out a plan to keep each others' spending in check. Step 4 might include instituting a spending plan, such as withdrawing a set amount of cash from the bank each month for groceries, entertainment and miscellaneous expenses. When the cash is gone, the spending stops.

Does the concrete-ness of the plan start to make sense? Without concrete details, you, like most of us, will tend to deal with your money emotionally rather than logically. Hard facts and figures help us detach from our moral issues about money and act logically. When you begin to think and act logically about your money, you have succeeded in instituting yet another top wealth creating habit in your life!

About The Author
Stephanie Yeh and her partner have helped many other people achieve and experience prosperity with the help of a strong 15 year network marketing business. Her current project, the Journeyman Wealth Program, is aimed at helping 15 people a year fully achieve their dreams. Stephanie's Prosperity Abounds website works on the basic principle that "You are the creator of your own reality!". Get more details on her website at http://www.prosperity-abounds.com/.info@prosperity-abounds.com

Teach Children About Money

I read this article and would like to share with all of you. I personally believe that Financial Planning should start young. Whenever I read the newspapers about the young adult asking parent for money or get into huge debt via their credit cards, ready credit, etc., my heart sink. However, it is never too late to know and to educate our children about the importance and value of money. The concept of Financial Planning should be shared with the young even during childhood so that they have the habit of saving and spending wisely. This applies to all regardless how much they earn when they grow up. You may have read that even professional is short of money, so everyone has to be money wise.

Want to Teach Children About Money?

By Ric EdelmanFrom Inside Personal Finance

I have bad news and worse news. The bad news is that thousands of high school seniors recently flunked a test on personal finance, with an average score of just 50%; only 4% of the students passed. The worse news – yeah, it gets worse – is that these scores are actually lower than they were six years ago. That’s right: In the 1997 study, seniors scored 57%, and they scored 52% in 2000 and in 2004. The tests were administered nationwide by the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. To learn more about this, I visited with Dara Duguay:

Ric: Dara, what on earth is going on?
Dara: Ric, this year’s results were horrible, and the scores are getting progressively worse. The problem is that only 15% of the students in our survey reported learning anything about personal finance in school. That means the number one teacher is the parent. But in many cases, the parent doesn’t know how to teach about money. Thus, we often find the blind leading the blind.

Ric: The obvious answer is for parents and teachers to become more involved, but as you said, they often know little about personal finance themselves. So, what can they do to learn how to teach money to kids?
Dara: We encourage parents to go to our web site: http://www.jumpstartcoalition.org/, where they will find hundreds of curriculum resources for children in kindergarten through grade 12. Most of the materials are free.

Ric: Kindergarten? How young is too young to start?
Dara: I tell parents to start teaching kids about money as soon as they start asking for it. Our web site offers several dozen types of learning materials for children in kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades. You can start teaching very young children, and the younger the better.

Ric: You mentioned that only 15% of students report that they’re learning anything about finance in the school. It’s bad enough that most schools don’t teach this subject, but it’s unconscionable that some that once did, have stopped. Tell me about the situation in Illinois.
Dara: Illinois has been our shining example for many years. High school seniors there must take a personal finance test during their senior year. If they fail it, they are required to take an entire semester of consumer education. Most Illinois students do fail it, so they enroll in this class in their last semester. Illinois’ approach has been very different from most states. Usually, there is no separate discipline called personal finance, so if money management is taught at all in school, it has to be linked with another discipline. For instance, it can be part of a family consumer science class. Or it can become a component in a business class. Unfortunately, in most states, family consumer science and business classes are electives. Because personal finance is not required, only a small percentage of students actually take these electives.

Ric: So Illinois has shown us a great way it can be done.
Dara: Yes. However, because of the “back to the basics” movement that focuses on reading, writing, and arithmetic, Illinois is considering dumping all of the tests that are not central to what they perceive as their basic mission. If implemented, that thrust would include getting rid of the personal finance test, meaning students in Illinois will no longer be required to take this consumer education class.

Ric: So how can we counter this back-to-basics movement?
Dara: We need to figure out how we can include personal finance in some of the basic core courses. For example, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill have talked about integrating personal finance into math classes. This makes sense: If you’re going to teach addition and subtraction, why not teach it in the context of balancing a checkbook? If you’re going to teach multiplication, we can teach it in the context of compound interest calculations. We need to see where we can integrate personal finance into main stream courses. For example, Iowa students use my book, Please Send Money, Financial Survival Guide for Young Adults, in English classes.

Ric: Well, they have to read something, so why not read about a girl named Mary, who gets herself into credit card debt, and who learns what to do about it!
Dara: Yes, we need to start thinking creatively about ways to incorporate personal finance into the core subjects.

Ric: In one sense, the situation today is very different from 20 years ago. Back when I started in the personal finance field, there was little information available to teach people about money — adults as well as children. But today, there is a huge wealth of information readily available, and the Jump$tart Coalition is an outstanding source for such information. So the problem is no longer lack of information. Instead, the problem is access to that information.
I’m talking about the gatekeepers. They exist in every field, and here, the two primary gatekeepers are educators and employers. They resist teaching about personal finance partly because they don’t consider it part of their mission, and partly because they have plenty of other obligations that demand their attention. Schools, for example, have perennial budget restraints, as well as too many mandates from the community and government. Employers say it’s not their responsibility to teach employees about money, and besides, laws and regulations sometimes prohibit them from offering finance advice to their workforces. Dara, no wonder you are having trouble getting your materials into the hands of people who need them.
Dara: You’re absolutely right. I think teaching personal finance is not seen as being that important, given all the responsibilities that schools and employers already have. However, if we continue to regard personal finance as something that is supposed to be taught in the home only — and not in school or the workplace — our country will continue to produce poorly trained consumers. Ironically, several studies conducted by Virginia Tech show positive relationships between knowledge about personal finance and job performance. Employees with financial problems don’t perform as well on the job as those who don’t have such troubles. It is easy to understand why; it’s hard to concentrate on work when you’re worried about how you’re going to pay your mortgage or make credit card payments, especially when you are getting calls at work from collection agencies. Studies show that financial education in the workplace actually boosts performance, improves morale, and reduces turnover and absenteeism. If employers want to increase their productivity, they should offer money management courses for their employees. And employees want this education, too.

Ric: So we need to focus on the gatekeepers. How do we convince them that their audiences need and want the information that is now available?
Dara: That is the most frustrating part. However, there is some good news. The U.S. Treasury Department is starting a series of educational roundtables in conjunction with the U. S. Department of Education. We’re hoping to get a lot of the education groups involved who have previously not shown any interest in personal finance education. And I’m hoping that having key government officials talking about the need and the importance of personal finance will help these educators see the importance of financial education and want to get involved.

Ric: Dara, the work Jump$tart is doing on behalf of parents and educators is outstanding, and I encourage my readers who have school-age children in their lives to visit http://www.jumpstartcoalition.org/
updated 11.29.05

Welcome To My First Blog

Hi! Anyone like to share your experience in wealth management.