Your Money Matters To Your Kids
You’re Teaching Them About Life
Our household has been interested in personal finance for years. What started as an aggressive journey to eliminate student debt has morphed into an ongoing focus and priority surrounding money. Over the years, with deliberate budgeting and careful planning, we’ve gotten in the habit and mindset of living below our means each month. We put artificial constraints on spending our money.
Are there purchases and items that we’d like to have? Absolutely. (A boat, if anyone is making a list) Could we have many of those items if we chose? Likely. But we don’t make those purchases, and we do it explicitly for the current and future well being of our children. We willingly (and happily) live below our means to experience money and life differently.
Money Differences
Our children live in a different world. They inhabit a country and society lacking for nothing, particularly compared with many other countries and regions. A small example: shoes. Want to get some new shoes? Amazon will give you 10,000 options to view on your digital device, any of which can be at your doorstep in less than 48 hours. This is the stuff of science fiction only a few generations ago.
Intentionally holding the brake on spending and consuming makes it possible for our children to grow up with healthy doses of thriftiness, self-sufficiency, and stewardship.
Thriftiness
Thriftiness is the practice of being careful with your dollars. It teaches our kids to value their time and efforts, to part slowly with the money they’ve earned. Being thrifty is less about cheapness, but more focused on value. Do I see a good return for my investment of money? Are my efforts to earn this capital being used wisely in this particular instance? Thriftiness fosters patience and discernment, useful character traits to encourage.
Self-Sufficiency
You can buy the birthday cake or make it from scratch. Take the car to the mechanic to fix the starter, or repair it yourself. Send your laptop to Best Buy for a repair or troubleshoot it yourself. All of these replace the need to do the work yourself. Convenient yes, but our kids will miss out on this reality: there’s ownership, confidence, and skills that come with tackling a problem hands-on, rather than buying a solution.
And our children can be part of a self-sufficient community. Other people in your community are more than willing to assist you with their skills and knowledge. You can engage them, with the expectation that they can call upon you for assistance as well. Working towards (not buying) a solution strengthens relationships.
Stewardship
Fundamentally, our money and resources are not ours. They’ve been entrusted into our care for some time, with the expectation that we will use them wisely. The resources that we have been given, above and beyond necessities, do not get stashed away; we’re not miserly with them.
Where does our extra monthly money go? Donations, paying off debt, and savings. Stewardship means putting money to use, not hoarding it. We want our children to understand that carefully shepherding their cash enables them to have a more significant impact on their chosen priorities. Money is not the goal; it’s a tool for helping to reach a goal.
Why are these three traits important? They lead directly to three extremely positive outcomes for your kids and their future.
3 Outcomes You Want For Your Kids
Freedom
Not only financial freedom but mental and emotional freedom. Want to see a nervous wreck and stressed-out person? Get someone loaded up with debt, juggling lose-lose trade-offs of how to use their money, and keeping one step ahead of the creditors.
Diligence in personal finance provides space and freedom of movement in one’s life. Not only are the immediate financial needs handled, but you have a stable platform from which you can work on your priorities. Absent financial chaos, you have the energy and attention to pursue your interests and goals. That’s an excellent outcome for anyone.
Mastery (of Life and Money)
Money is not the master. We are stewards of our dollars and have control over it. Our money uses our priorities; we need to be in the driver-seat on those priorities. Money problems are fundamentally emotional problems. Money spent reflects decisions, preferences, habits, and failings. Our ability to use money wisely often reflects the choices we have made (and are still making) and prioritizing our attention and energy.
Contentment
Going without is a great way to foster contentment in your children. It forces them (and you) to realize how little it takes to satisfy. It allows energies to be put into relationships, skills, and activities, rather than into acquisitions (which never seem to fulfill as we think they will). When you’re content, every day is a gift. The fantastic thing is that it’s a gift we can give ourselves; it only requires a shift in our priorities and mindset.
Back To The Future
We’re deliberate with our money because we are careful about the people we want our children to become. When I speak to my kids, I try to envision: Who is the person I want to be talking with when they’re 18? 25? Or 30? How can my words or example right now, help create that person? How can our purchases and financial priorities help create that person?
We want our children to have a historical perspective as well. Their life experiences of plenty and convenience are atypical of history. Go back only a few generations, and daily life was considerably harder and far less convenient. Everything was slower, with drastically reduced options and choice, and everything took a lot more sweat to accomplish. It’s good to remind your kids that their present luxuries are the product of a whole society’s collective labor.
Setting The Tone
You set the tone in your household, in matters large and small. You set the tone about money. This fact needs reinforcing continuously; there is always the tug and pull to slip back towards poor spending habits and lackluster oversight.
We convince ourselves that we need something now.
We have conditioned ourselves to buy things.
We self-identify as “consumers,” and we often consume on impulse.
Take time. Not everything you could want to have in your life needs purchase in the next six weeks, much less in the next 48 hours. The world’s influence will still call our kids to buy continuously. Our examples can provide them a fuller, more satisfying path forward, one that leads to contentment and confidence.
Moving forward
Do you approach your use of money as a lesson for your household and children?
Start today: set artificial limits on what you are willing to buy and restrictions on your money. Make it a tool, not a master.
Originally published at https://fjwriting.com on August 12, 2020.
