Welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast this is episode 60. Tonight we’re going to talk about money lessons for our five-year-olds.
Andrew and I both have younger daughters and we’re going to talk a little bit about money and what we would teach our kids if we wanted to teach them more about money and I thought I would go ahead and start off and talk a little bit about some of my experiences with my little girlie and kind of go from there.
Just to kind of give you a little bit of background my daughter’s going to be six here very shortly and we go to Walmart a lot to go shopping and stuff and she always wants toys and she wants Toys Toys Toys more toys.
My wife and I have been discussing about whether we should give her an allowance, whether she should earn it and kind of going back and forth on what we should do. And so I thought that I should have her to help her learn the value of money that I should give her some air quote jobs to earn the money that we give her every week.
And so what I thought of was kind of creating basically three buckets. The way I do it is that I have a little chart that we created and Sadie, my daughter and I sat down and we went through everything and we came up with jobs that she could do things like emptying the dishwasher, dusting, helping us vacuum, sweeping the floor, getting dressed every day because that’s something she likes to do at this stage.
All those things we came up with dollar amounts and why not so at the end every Sunday we look at the chart together and then we tally up her money and then we hand it over. And so instead of just giving her the money and just letting her kind of run wild with it and going to Walmart or Toys R Us who was going out of business sadly.
Whether we do any of those things and just let her go run rampant and basically blow all the money. I thought about my life in how I kind of learned money and I love my parents to death but they didn’t teach me much about money and I kind of had to learn it the hard way and I after working in the bank for all those years I noticed that very much so people are really not taught money.
They’re not taught how to use it what its value is how to earn it  how to save any of those kinds of things we all have to learn it the really hard way I’ll give you an example just recently when I was in another restaurant I was working in I was away from the restaurant for a bit and a vendor came in and I needed somebody to write the vendor a check and the other manager that was on duty was a younger guy and I called him up as a hey can you write this check out for this vendor and he’s like no I can’t I’m like why he said I don’t know how to write a check and I thought wah wah ha ha.
And he’s like I don’t know how to write a check and I’m like how is that even possible then I thought about it for a second he’s younger he’s worked in the electronic he’s lived in the electronic age and so with the internet and  the availability of online banking and debit cards and credit cards. Makes sense he’s probably never ever written a check before so I just thought to myself while I was talking to my daughter that this is something that I need to try to help her with.
And so the avenue that I started with to kind of work on this and again this is always going to be a work in progress was I came up with a bucket of three buckets that she should put her money in and encouraged her to try to help her with these ideas.
And so the first the first bucket is kind of your spending money so for five-year-old she doesn’t have to worry about rent or car payments she gets to worry about buying or Toys. What I did told her was is that you could put some of your money in there so that’s the money that we can go when we go to the store to go shopping that you can buy yo...