How Smooth Is Your Child’s Pathway To Financial Success?

Thank you to Discover for sponsoring this post. The honest opinions are my own.

As parents of a 9 & 8 year old, we haven’t had to have THE talk quite yet, but there are certain little steps we have taken over the years so that when we have the real talk, we’ll be ready. If you have a teen, have you had the talk yet? I am talking about a taboo word within a lot of families . . . MONEY.

For some reason, a lot of families are uncomfortable talking to their kids about money. To make it even worse, most of the time schools only briefly touch on the subject, so it is very important to make sure your child has a solid understanding of earning, spending and saving before they are done with high school. After high school, your child will be lost at college or the in the real world without this understanding.

As a Discover Preferred Blogger, I wanted to share some tips and some sites you can visit to learn more about the subject and make sure you and your child are properly prepared. You can never start too young.

There is never a bad time to talk about finances with your children. Discover’s Pathway to Financial Success Program offers some awesome resources to help start and guide your conversation. There are educational videos and some that are fun, but they all offer ways or tips to get started.

In Discover’s Pathway to Financial Success Program there is lots of great info for parents about how to talk to your kids about money. Advice for how to become a good financial role model, quizzes and even information on how to involve your school in financial education. This site has an amazing amount of information.

The site even involves your children, as there are additional resources for students, geared towards kids to help them learn financial responsibility and even games to make sure they have some fun as they learn.

With our kids, we are trying to show them how money is earned, we talk to them about our jobs and how we earn money and we have chores and allowances available for Kora and Logan. The goal is to help them learn how to keep track of money and how to earn it.

We have a tricky time with letting them spend the money they earn; that is something we need to work on. A great tip I learned from the site is when your child wants to buy some things, go over what they need/want with them and agree upon an amount of money they can spend. This initial intro to budgeting will let your child see what it’s like to have to make some basic monetary decisions and learn some basic things like deciding between taking 5 weeks of allowance money for 1 video game or to buy something smaller in the meantime.

Teaching children about how money is earned, spent and saved starts early, and the more you do now, the better prepared you will be about the money talk in the future.

What steps have you taken to educate your child about finances?