The First Step in Teaching our Kids about Money

Smart Money, Smart Kids (Part 1)

(affiliate links are used)
I’m pleased to announce that I have been selected to be part of the Smart Money, Smart Kids launch team.  Yay!!

I’m going to be telling you all about the book in bits and pieces over several weeks.

Do you want your children to learn how to handle money correctly?  Do you want them to avoid some of the financial mistakes that you have made?  Are you at a loss as to how to start the process?  Now there’s help.  Smart Money, Smart Kids teaches you how to raise money-smart kids in a debt-filled world.

My husband and I have been huge Dave Ramsey fans for most of our marriage.  I’m not sure where we originally heard about him, but early on in our marriage we read The Total Money Makeover together and loved it.  A few years ago we had the opportunity to go through the Financial Peace University at our church.  Once again we loved all the material we were learning and we loved getting to share those ideas with others.  For the last 11 years, those “others” have included our children.  We, as parents, have a responsibility to teach our children good money habits.  We need to teach them how to handle $10 correctly now so they can handle $10,000 correctly when they are older.  Good money habits are not about how much money you have, but about the principles that govern that money.


So how do we teach our kids about money?  Good question.  The number one thing we can do, according to Dave Ramsey (and according to common sense), is to model good money habits ourselves.  Do we tell our children to tithe their earnings at church but forget to tithe ours?  Do we make our children save up for something big but pull out our credit card for every little thing we want?  Our children are like little video recorders.  They watch everything we do and they record it in their brains.  Later when we try to make them do something that we aren't doing ourselves, they pull out that video file from their archives and say “But Mom, remember when you did…”  And you’re busted!  Start off your children’s financial education by getting financially educated yourself.  You don’t have to have “arrived” at Financial Peace or wealth but you need to have the education and the intention to know where you plan to go financially.  A good place to start is with The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.  It is a step by step guide that gets you out of debt, and into saving.

If you are a Dave Ramsey fan at all, you know his background story.  By the time he was in his mid-20′s he had made millions of dollars.  They were living the high life….that would be a life high on debt.  All that came crashing down on him and he went bankrupt with a wife and 2 small children.  That was the point in his life where he decided to learn about money and to learn how to handle money.  And thus began the road to financial peace.  His daughter, Rachel, was a baby back then and doesn't remember the “crash” but she does remember growing up in a house where learning about money was key.  In Chapter 1 of the book, she recalls her earliest days as a Ramsey kid and what it was like to grow up as a Ramsey.  I really enjoy the way Rachel writes.  Her story is written more like a memoir then a “how to” book.  Rachel and her father, Dave, have teamed up together to write Smart Money, Smart Kids so you get the interesting perspective of seeing things from both the father and the daughter’s points of view.  Very cool!

I’ll tell you about chapter 2 tomorrow.  But for now…

If you’d like a sneak peek at the book, visit the Smart Money, Smart Kids website.  Scroll on down to where it says “Start reading now for free.”  Stick your email address in that little box and hit enter and the first 2 chapters of the book will be sent to you.

If, after reading those 2 chapters, you decide you want to order the book, I would highly suggest pre-ordering instead of waiting for it to come out.  If you pre-order you get a bunch of cool freebies to go along with the book.  You get the hard copy, the e-book version, the audiobook version and a free video lesson.  You can check it all out on the Smart Money, Smart Kids website.