Teach Kids Money Skills

Find ideas to teach kids money skills and and help them learn business, entrepreneurship and other financial skills.

• Is the education received in schools today equipping children to meet the challenges of earning a living?




• Does your banker ever ask for your report card instead of your financial statements?




• When do you measure the success of your education? At graduation or retirement?

By now you probably realize that we, parents need to equip our children with the skills to earn and manage money, to engage in business, as well as to save and invest for their retirement years.

What you might not know, is that more and more studies are showing that children are leaving school and even tertiary institutions with very little business savvy. Now, if their parents or teachers had realized that they needed to teach kids money skills when they were young, they might not find themselves in this situation!

Most of our generation has had to learn from the "school of hard knocks" or from necessity because we were never trained in the necessary financial skills.

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If you think that preschool is a bit young to begin, read on and I will share with you how our preschool children have started their financial education.

But first let me share some family background. This has been a journey that started with us, the parents:

Our Stories

Highschool Drop-out vs University Graduate

Well, after being 'hard done by' in the school system, at age 16, he had to get street-wise fast and learn to stand on his own two feet. Now, to his satisfaction, he is financially better off than those nay-saying teachers, some of whom are still working in the local school!

Like a few other less-than-well-schooled people I know, he has proved that a good school education is not an essential requirement for success in business!

In contrast, I did well academically at school and completed an honours degree at university, but afterwards I had very little business sense. I remember vividly, being dumb-struck one day when my father-in-law asked me, "So Shirley, what ideas do you have for making money?"

I had never learned ways for a kid to make money, and I had never even thought of anything but working for somebody else as an adult! My story shows that a good academic education is no guarantee of success either.

Financial Education

As a result of our own experiences, Riaan and I have been determined to teach our children about money so that they can learn about business and entrepreneurship before they leave home and have to make it on their own in the real world.

We want them to have opportunities to learn from experience, even from their mistakes if necessary, under our guidance and within the safety of our home environment. A few years ago we read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and this book gave us some good tips on how to succeed financially and how to teach kids money skills too.

After that, we read about 15 other financial education books and started applying what we learned in our own lives as well as our children's.

Since then our preschoolers have learned words like 'debt' and 'investment' as well as 'delayed gratification', 'profit' and 'passive income'.

After we sold a vehicle, my then four year old son said to me, "Mom, if the guy who bought the pick-up truck borrowed the money from the bank, then he actually works for the bank now!" I wonder if the buyer himself had that kind of insight!

At 5 or 6 years of age our one daughter invested ten rand (about 3 bricks worth) into a spec house that my husband was building. She had to wait about a year for the house to sell before she received back her capital plus the pro-rata return on her investment.

She then added a few more rand she had earned to the total and reinvested it in another small business venture. This young lady has not just learned ways for a kid to make money, but she has already learned to make her money grow!

These two children have also invested in another family home jewellery business. We have had 'board meetings' to decide whether they can withdraw some of their earnings from the business and the four members of the board had to take a vote. Then they had to write a letter recording the transaction, which was signed by the four parties concerned.

They have also tried some other once-off entrepreneurial ventures like repackaging and selling nuts that we bought wholesale, as well as performing services in return for payment. You will often hear them ask, "Mom, can I do... (fill in the blank) ... for five rand?"