Recently
we started a new extracurricular project
with our 14 year old son. The mission
to teach him the value of a dollar.
This seems
like a relatively easy thing to do until you stop and think that if America was
still taught the value of a dollar then would the rate of bankruptcy and
foreclosures being headline news in the local papers. This took about a month of hubby and talking
and deciding what we wanted him to learn.
The goal of this mission is for our son to learn how to budget his bills
with his income coming in the door, along with how to write checks out. To get this started first I ordered a set of
play checks, check registry, and deposit slips off of Amazon to work with him
on the actual mechanics of writing checks to pay bills.
The fun
part was coming up with a story for him.
Basically what we decided was that he ‘earned’ $60 for each day of
school completed. So he is paid $300 a
week, to begin with we are not worrying about taxes and all that we told him to
budget for bring home pay of $300 a week.
Each Friday he is given an envelope with a sheet telling him that his
EFT has been made for X amount (The amount can very is school is short week),
along with a menu planning sheet, a shopping list, and any bills such as Rent,
Water, Electric, TV/Internet, etc. Then
each week he has to draw what we call an opportunity card, and we have karma
cards that we award as earned.
Opportunity cards are for unexpected expenses such as having to caller a
plumber, and karma cards are for things that are positives such as Mom and Dad
upgraded their living room furniture and let you have the old set.
We are now
finishing up the second month of this project and we are really getting into
it, our son is paying more attention how much things cost at the grocery, and
not asking for near as much stuff. I
think one of the quickest changes we seen was the lights going off around the
house, it doesn’t matter if he is just leaving a room for a minute he shuts the
light off without prompting now.
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