Here are links to six great articles for teaching children to manage money with easy to implement tips for all ages from toddlers to teens. Teaching children how to manage money is a gift that will have a lifetime of benefits! Teaching Your Children How to Manage Money -- Simply Real Moms provides tips by age group of things you can do to teach your children about money. Many Money Habits are Set by Age 7 -- msn Money says that parents need to start teaching and modeling good money management for kids before they enter kindergarten. Twenty Things Kids Need to Know to Live Financially Smart Lives -- Money as You Grow, an initiative of the President's Advisory Council on Financial Capability. Lessons and activities by age group. For Me, For ... [Read More]
Finances
5 Easy Steps to Organizing Your Financial Life: Part 5 Be Prepared
Organize Your Financial Paper Series: Use the documents gathered for filing your income tax return in Part 1 to prepare for emergency in Part 2, to set financial goals and plan ahead in Part 3. Part 4 helps you build a budget. What happens if you find yourself without any of the paper work that proves you are who you say you are? That proves you own your car, house and furniture? That gives you access to money and financial resources? That connects you to medical care? Lack of documentation was one of the biggest obstacles in managing life for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, mud slides are only some of the causes of quick evacuation with very little warning. What would you grab if you had fifteen minutes to leave and did not know if ... [Read More]
Organize Your Financial Life: Develop a Spending Plan
Welcome to A Pinch of Joy! This post is part 4 in a series on using tax documents to organize your financial life. We began this series by gathering documents for tax preparation in Part 1 and each week added a bit more information. In Part 2, the papers helped prepare for emergencies. In part 3, you developed financial goals to live the life you want and to make sure you and your family have adequate protection through savings and insurance, a debt repayment plan. We also took a snapshot of where you stand financially. In Part 4, refer again to that tidy little pile of tax papers that started this financial adventure – plus a little more information. An easy way to develop a spending plan to help you achieve the financial goals and live the life you want to live. A ... [Read More]
Organize Your Financial Life: Plan the Life You Want
Part 3 Plan the Life You Want: Getting Started by Setting Financial Goals How to lead the life you want to have. It only takes a bit of financial planning to shape things so that our life is lived proactively and we can have more of the things we want. We all get thrown a curve ball now and then, but if we’ve thought ahead it will be easier to respond to the unexpected. Planning helps us get the most for our money on a day to day basis, even if we are currently living pay check to pay check. When we look at the overall financial picture, it is easy to see how each financial decision affects other areas. We are better prepared to make intelligent decisions, adapt to changes as we enter different stages of life and to set regularly updated priorities for our finances. It is the road ... [Read More]
Organize Your Financial Life Part 2 — I.C.E.
Whenever we travel by car, Wheels adds a pair of rubber boots to the cargo. Weather insurance, he says. If he has them along, it won’t rain. You have to know their twisted sense of humor to get the laugh out of that statement that he and Bytes do – but it has worked! Wheels has never had to wear those boots. Our topic today is like the “boots in the trunk”. No guarantee of sunny weather but you’ll be prepared – and everyone hopes those preparations are never needed. In the first post in this series, I told you we would use the information gathered for tax purposes for several other things as well. First of all, that nice neat pile of tax papers from that post is going I.C.E. In. Case. of Emergency. Most of us, if traveling for a year, would likely leave ... [Read More]
Organizing Your Financial Papers – Part 1 Preparing for tax time
Part 1 - Preparing for tax time Running a family is very much like running a business. We make projections, purchases, plans and provisions for the future. In order to do those things, we need basic financial information. Without it, we are operating in the dark, missing who knows what opportunities. Every family needs to know: what are the sources of our income and how much does each source provide, what is the total expenditure of our financial resources and where is it going, how are we going to manage income and expenses to maximize our finances. Each family needs plans for emergencies and for the future. The basics of all this information can be found in the material gathered for tax preparation. If you gather information as you go along and as the year end paper work ... [Read More]
