How far would you go to teach your kids about managing money? Tune in to hear what one father did, on today’s Home School Heartbeat with Mike Smith.
Mike Smith:
Terry, last time you described how you and your wife handed over the management of the household finances to each of your teens for two years at a time. How did this impact them?
Terry Stokka:
One thing is that they learned that it costs more than they thought to run a household. We wanted to show them firsthand how that all worked, and teach them financial responsibility by paying bills. We also wanted to show them about giving by having them actually write tithe checks and understand that this is money that could be spent for something else, but we felt that it was important; and also for paying credit card bills in full and paying bills on time. We have tried to be generous in our giving-in our tithing-and it was sometimes hard for them and they would express that to us: hard for them to write a check to a Christian organization and then to have us tell them it was too expensive to get some article of clothing or some gadget when their friends got some of the same things. They also learned that they had to stay on top of the finances or they could actually get away from them. And I’ll have to say it wasn’t a perfect solution, because they had a few bounced checks in college, and yet they knew what to do about it because they had some experience. They also learned what happened when they made a hundred-dollar or four-hundred-dollar math error in the checkbook (and I’ve done a little bit of that myself!). But it was a good experience for them to see what a real household has to do to manage finances.
Mike:
Terry, thank you for sharing that very creative approach to teaching financial responsibility. And until next time, I’m Mike Smith.
