With a lot of families tightening their belts, these days, teaching your children the value of money becomes more important than ever. Money is such an abstract concept, it can be hard for children (and even some adults) to understand how little actions add up to big savings. Here are a few ideas to make money more real for everyone.
Saving Money Step-by-Step
You've probably heard the example about saving money by making your coffee at home. If you have one $3 latte a day, you are spending about $750 per year on coffee. It costs far less to brew at home. So apply the same idea to something children can relate to -- school lunch.
School Lunch: Little Savings Add Up
At our school, lunch costs $2.25 per student if bought at school. That's $4.50 for two kids to eat at school. One loaf of the best high fiber bread costs $4.50 at our grocery. I asked the kids, how many sandwiches that loaf could make? That was easy, 10. Enough for a whole week of lunches.
Now here's where you don't need to get too detailed. Remember you need to keep the idea simple for kids so you don't lose them. I added 50 cents on for the remainder cost of making lunches. I'm assuming I buy the bread on sale most of the time (saving $1.50/loaf) and they are having peanut butter with homemade jelly for about 20 cents per day per kid. The important thing here is the rounding is close enough to make the example work. Bottom line, it costs $5 per week for both of them to eat homemade lunches.
A Simple Idea, a Tangible Number
When my children understood that it costs them about the same to eat lunch one day at school as it does to eat homemade lunches for an entire school week, the light began to go on.
Doing the Math
(At our school, our children are learning to do math both with words and number formulas. Here's the story problem. The number formula follows.)
We figured out what it would cost to buy all of our lunches at school in a week: $22.50. By itself, this is a staggering figure to a 7 and year old! Then we multiplied the number of weeks in the school year (about 36) to get the cost to ear all of our lunches at school: $810. Subtracting out the cost to eat homemade lunches ($180), we found a number that even turns a parent's head: $630!
Annual cost of school lunch: (2 x $2.25x5) x 36= $810
Annual cost of homemade lunch: $5 x 36 = $180
Savings by making lunch at home: $ 810 - $180 = $630 !
This process can be applied to other real world examples the kids are part of. Some of the ones we've calculated are annual savings if we bike instead of drive to school once a week, making cookies instead of buying cookies, and so forth.
Real Life Examples Teach Value Skills
Real life exercises are important lessons which will help your children start to get a handle on money and establish strong financial management skills. It can also help them feel a part of being a team-member in family belt-tightening. And best of all you don't have to be the bad guy anymore when you hand them their lunch in a sack.
Now It's your Turn.
How have you taught your children to value money and not be wasteful? I hope you'll leave a comment, we'll all grow richer by sharing our experiences!
I have three children that have no idea how to save money. My fault I know! Some very good tips....thanks for this!
Moms At Work
|72.189.159.xxx
|2008-10-10 10:31:29
great learning examples!
Kirsten
|70.20.221.xxx
|2008-10-10 10:41:25
I really enjoyed this post. Thanks for sharing your insights! Not only an eye opener for the kids, but for the parents too! Add school lunch cost to the cost of parents' morning coffee stop, ordering out lunch (and heck, even dinner)... and you could be spending half your annual salary on prepared foods!!
Just one example:
Home delivery pizza: $25
Frozen pizza from the grocery: $10
Pizza you make yourself: $5
At our house we have about 40 pizza's a year (or at least that's all I'm willing to admit we have!). If we make all of them from scratch at home instead of having them delivered, we save $800!
I won't claim to never have pizza delivered, but I do think about the tradeoff when I CHOOSE to spend the extra cash.
Milander
|79.122.95.xxx
|2008-10-10 12:48:27
Bith my wife and I come from "poor" backgrounds we both learned to make do with what we had when we were kids. Our parents put us through college and now we are both relatively rich (by our standards). However, we still use leftovers, still make big pot lunches which guarantees extras for the next day, still grow our own veg and fruit and always visit the local markets for stuff we can't grow or get ourselves.
We aren't miserly with our kids, they get their share of pizza, chips (fries) and the occasional cheeseburger) but I hope our example and experience of not having enough on the plate will be passed down to our kids so that they can not only apreciate the value of what they have on their plate but also an appreciation of what REAL food tastes like instead of the microwave/readymeal culture that most western cultures seem to be adopting.
I realise the post is about kids understanding the value of money or what they have but unless they can understand where something comes from they cannot understand the idea of money nor where it comes from and the best place to begin teaching this is in the kitchen.
I agree that it's easy to lose our connection with our food. When we pick our own fruit and make our own jam, not only does it cost less -- but it tastes better!
Mom Stages 
Thanks for the info I'll add it.
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