Advice On How To Raise Financially Savvy Kids [Personal Finance]

CNN asks some money experts for tips on how to teach kids about personal finance. Laura Levine, the executive director of Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, says she uses a special piggy bank for her 3-year-old son—it has four chambers, "one for saving, one for spending, one for donating and one for investing," and helps teach him that money is not just for "one thing."

Other tips are a little more traditional, like have your kid write down everything he spends money on, or save his allowance for a special purchase, or—and this is probably the biggest stumbling block—lead by example:

Parents can help with the basics, but a lot of them also lack financial education, Levine said. She added that where parents can be very helpful is in giving their kids their first lesson about money.
 
There are concerns that parents aren't setting a good example for kids. The national savings rate has declined since 2001.
 
"Today's kids, just like their parents, are coming up in a spending culture," Levine said.
 
The most important thing for a parent is to make sure that their child's first savings experience is a successful one, she said. Too many people try to get their kids to save for things that are too far into the future or too big. For a young child, saving for next year is an eternity, she said. If the goal is intangible, the money will seem lost to the child.

20 different ways to make good use of carpet ... [Home]

20 different ways to make good use of carpet remnants. We like the idea of having them in the car for throwing under the tires in case of too much mud or snow. [ Frugal For Life ]

Apple Replaces Hundreds Of Dollars In iTunes Purchases After Hard Drive Crashes [Above And Beyond]

Like any responsible computer user, Benny regularly backs up his data. Unfortunately for him, the three Seagate external hard drives he used failed, and he lost about $500 in iTunes purchases. Seagate wanted $1700 to recover the data. Fortunately, Apple saved the day.

Benny writes:

18 months ago I bought 3 hard drives from Seagate. Very quickly, they began to fail under regular usage due to ye olde Clicke of Deathe. This last month, another drive failed with all of my iTunes data that I'd just transferred for safety. I located Seagate's Data Recovery department and found out that the bill for recovery starts at $1700, even for a home user. I then wrote to Apple's tech support and told them what had happened and asked if they could re-enable my purchases (which totaled less than $500 over a couple years). This morning I woke up to a great email from an Apple guy who re-enabled almost everything I'd purchased! The only omissions were some episodes of The Office, which isn't so bad considering the scale of the purchased amount.

Naturally, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome. Mark one up for Apple.

Subscribe with an RSS reader Older News Archive Add news to your web site