How to Teach Kids About Money

How to Teach Kids About Money

Does your child get the gimmies every time you go to the grocery store? Mine too. And I’ll be honest, I was tired of it. So I set out on a mission to change it.

My son is 5 years old and we (my husband and I) decided it was about time that he learn about the work-money relationship. We want to teach him about financial responsibility and how to earn, save, give, and spend while he is young and with small amounts of money. I would rather him make big mistakes with $5 now rather than big mistakes with $50,000 in 20 years.

Our goal was simple: Teach him to work for his money. If he works, he gets paid. If he doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid.

We first created a list of chores we thought were age appropriate for Caleb at 5 years old. This will obviously be different for each child and family. The chores we chose for Caleb are:

• Vacuum living room rug & sofa
• Wipe down bathroom counters
• Feed the dog breakfast & dinner
• Sweep the front porch
• Empty bathroom trashcans

He also does a few chores each day that aren’t paid chores. He does this simply because he is part of our family. Those chores include things like making his bed, cleaning up toys, and loading his dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

Since I love cute printables, I created one for Caleb’s chore chart. And because I love you all so much, I created it in several colors so you can use for them multiple children if you want! 🙂 {You can get a copy of the chore chart below!} I added in the chores he is required to do and a dollar amount each one is worth beside it. I then ran the page through our laminator so that I can reuse it from week to week.

We then grabbed 3 envelopes and let Caleb decorate them. On the front of each we wrote the words SAVE, SPEND, and GIVE. {He decided to draw pictures on his save envelope of something special he wants to save up for! :)}

At the end of each week, we will pay him his commissions based on the work he did. He will then have to put money in the GIVE envelope first. Then he will get to add money to his SAVE envelope. Finally, he can put what’s left in his SPEND envelope. We want to encourage our children to GIVE first, SAVE second, and SPEND what’s leftover.

I was inspired to implement this system after reading Dave Ramsey and Rachel Cruze’s book Smart Money Smart Kids.

We hope this system will teach our children the value of a dollar and the importance of giving first and saving for a rainy day. {Oh, and grab your free printable chore chart below!}

How do you teach your children about money?

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