How to Teach Personal Finance to Your Kids (It’s Easier Than You Think!)
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I don't think it's ever too early to begin teaching personal finance lessons and concepts to our kids.
When they're young, we try to teach them the difference between wants and needs. We might give them an allowance or let them earn money through doing chores so they can practice managing money.
Experience is a great teacher, right? And sometimes you have to make mistakes to learn and grow.
I don't know about you, though, but some mistakes I've made involving money turned out to be very costly.
So how do we do it differently with our kids?
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There are a lot of experiences they're going to encounter as young adults that they should be prepared for. Even our tweens! In the (somewhat) near future, they'll need to make decisions about purchasing a car, furnishing an apartment, or maybe buying a pet.
How can we give them these “experiences” the best we can, while they're under our roof, so they'll grow up with not only a realistic understanding about how money works, but the skills to manage it well?
When Should I Begin Teaching Personal Finance? 💲
As homeschooling families, we get to do things differently, right? We get to require things like personal finance that kids might not typically learn in school.
And introducing personal finance education early in homeschooling can be incredibly beneficial. When our kids are as young as elementary school, we can begin with basic concepts like saving, spending, and understanding the value of money.
As they grow, we need to be prepared to teach them more complex topics such as budgeting, investing, and understanding credit.
When we give our kids that strong financial literacy foundation, we're helping them prepare for real financial challenges they'll face, learn responsible habits, and reduce the risk of future financial difficulties.
Doing this doesn't have to be hard. And it can even be fun!
A Solution for Homeschoolers
Charla McKinley (along with her son!) is the author of both Beyond Personal Finance and Before Personal Finance. As a homeschool mom herself, she was inspired to create an interactive personal finance curriculum that aimed to reveal the true costs of “adulting”.
She is dedicated to teaching teens the importance of their choices, firmly believing that practicing financial decisions with simulated dollars helps prepare them for real-life challenges and prevents future regrets.
She has inspired many teens in the homeschool community—and now pre-teens as well!
Who is Before Personal Finance for?
I had a chance to review the course Beyond Personal Finance a while back, which is a great option for teenagers. I remember thinking that I couldn't wait to use it with my kids (who were only in elementary school at the time).
Now, the same company is offering a curriculum just for the “tween” years, kids ages 8-12, called Before Personal Finance.
I think this is a great age to really begin intentionally teaching personal finance topics. I don't know about your kids, but mine definitely dream about all of the things they're going to do when they're teenagers and adults; it's not that I want to burst any bubbles…but I want them to have a realistic sense of what they'll be encountering someday.
This course is for any parent who wants to start grounding their kids in the basics of smart money habits and management.
Whether your kids are completely new to personal finance or know the basics, they'll have a blast with this course and learn something new…about money, but also probably about themselves!
What does Before Personal Finance teach? 💰
My kids had just taken a class through our homeschool co-op called JA BizTown, and I was a little concerned that they might already know the material (and get a little bored). Boy was I wrong!
While JA BizTown did help my kids with some money management skills, it mostly related to the community and their roles in a free enterprise system. Before Personal Finance is different; this curriculum deals with more of their individual responsibilities when it comes to money, and puts them in a simulated position where they're really making decisions about their “life”.
It's really like no other curriculum I've seen!
It basically asks your kids to imagine themselves in the future (their “Future You” avatar), and each lesson puts them at another age in their life and offers a different scenario they have to make choices about.
They begin the course at age 13, and their avatar ends at age 22, having had experience making budgets, donating to charities, earning money, and dealing with interest, credit cards, and loans. They have to budget for snacks, clothes, entertainment, and some necessities. They also get to do some stock research and learn about insurance.
Here are the 10 different lessons covered in Before Personal Finance, along with the “scene” the kids have to put themselves in and imagine experiencing:
I love the concept of “aging” each lesson, as it really helps kids see what long-term budgeting and planning look like in real life, not just over a short period of time.
What do you get?
While the teen program has a digital component, Before Personal Finance just comes with a 150-page, full-color student workbook.
There are just a few online resources you'll need during the lessons, which are easily accessible for free from a handy QR codes or URLs within the student workbook.
What does a lesson look like?
Each lesson has four parts: Teaching, Activity, Scene, and Quiz. There are only 10 lessons in this course, and I think this makes it really easy to fit it into your homeschool schedule (or even teach it as a co-op class).
I'd say it took us about 2 hours to do most of the lessons. We actually worked on this curriculum over the summer, so since our schedule was a little bit more flexible, some days we would do an entire lesson in one sitting. But you definitely can break these up into two, or even 4 days pretty easily, and assign one lesson each week.
At the beginning of each lesson, you'll want to read the “Teacher's Corner” page in the Student Workbook. This is going to give you information about the lesson and tips on how to teach it.
The “Future You” section will tell them all about their avatar for the lesson!
Teaching
After that, you'll move onto the Teaching portion. Depending on the age of your kids, they could read these two pages of information on their own, or you can choose to teach it to them.
I love how all the text is broken up into sections with graphics and colorful images—it makes it really easy and interesting to read.
Activity
Next, there is some sort of activity your kids will do to reinforce the lesson. These activities vary; my daughters really enjoyed one where they got to plan a party and put their budgeting skills to the test!
In other activities, they get to design a business, analyze advertisements, fill a “generosity bank”, learn about national debt, design their own money, learn to write a check, do stock research, and learn about insurance.
Scene
Next, kids get a chance to visit the store and make their budget for the year.
They begin their budget with a little bit of money (either money they've earned or money they have left over from the last lesson), and there are difference scenarios to consider depending on their age that lesson.
The “Store” has a variety of items and experiences kids can purchase. I encouraged my girls to try to really put them in their avatar's shoes…if this was real life, what decisions would they really make? I think this is important, because you want them to see how these decisions will really play out and impact their “Future You”.
It was here that I really started to see different tendencies between my twin daughters…one is definitely more of a spender, and one is more of a saver! I kind of knew this, but, it was interesting to see those decisions play out at the beginning of the curriculum.
One of the most fun parts of this section is the “Plot Twist” wheel. Once a lesson, the kids spin a wheel online to give them a random situation that will affect their budget.
This could be something positive (like a generous grandparent giving a cash birthday gift), or something that costs them money (they buy souvenirs for all of their friends while on vacation). This plays into the “unexpectedness” we often have to deal with in our lives regarding our budgets!
Creating a budget each lesson is such a valuable experience for kids, and I could see it really starting to impact the decisions my daughters were making as we moved through the lessons.
Quiz
There's a multiple choice quiz at the end of each lesson (answer key is included in the teacher resources online), and a short reflection page. My daughters and I typically just discussed the reflection questions; if you were using this in a group or co-op setting, that's what I would do.
There's also an option puzzle in each lesson (mazes, word searches, logic puzzles, etc.) and an information page on “People Who Have Made a Difference”. I love these. They're just short little biographies to read of people who have made an impact on the world of finances.
Our Experience
At the time of writing this, we're about half-way through this curriculum, and enjoying it so much! I mentioned we are doing this over the summer—and my girls actually want to do the lessons each week!
It's definitely because the lessons are so hands-on and interesting. They're at the age where they love imagining growing up and doing all of these “grown-up” things, so I think it's been a great age to give this a try (they're 10 years old right now).
Like I said, it's been valuable for me as well to see the different choices they make! It gives me an idea of how they might handle “real” money and finances in the future.
And as for my daughters, they are learning a lot about their own spending habits too. My daughter who is a “spender”, when she realized how the choices she was making impacted their futures in the course, she realized she had to start making better choices. I think this is a lesson that will stick with her as she grows up.
How We'll Build On This
This course is a great intro to personal finance, but the course Beyond Personal Finance will be a great follow-up when they're older.
We're also big Dave Ramsey fans around here, so I plan on helping my kids set up their budgets on EveryDollar when they have jobs and are ready for that.
Equip Your Kids for Financial Success 💵
Teaching our kids about money and finances doesn't have to be scary. Or hard. And our kids will be better off by having learned these things in our homeschools!
When we give them tools and help set them up for success, they'll have more confidence, be better prepared to make good choices, and be more willing to have conversations with us about these things in the future.
Go check out Before Personal Finance for your homeschool today—I think you'll love it!
And leave a comment below: do you have any tips for teaching your kids about money and personal finance? I'd love to hear about it!
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