Your Money

Help Kids Learn How To Manage Money

Posted: 10/15/2010

A new booklet helps kids learn how to budget and save money-behaviors best learned while they are young.

(NAPSI) - Earning money, learning to create a budget and follow it, and saving money are keys to building wealth. They are also behaviors best learned while you are young.

That’s the idea behind a booklet designed to help your kids learn how to manage money. The brightly colored activity book is produced in a way to spark a young child’s imagination and promote conversations with parents and teachers.

“Great Minds Think: A Kid’s Guide To Money,” for 9- to 12-year-olds, is published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It teaches the basic concepts of financial decision making in an informative, fun way. Your children will learn about earning, spending, saving and opportunity cost.

Young readers start by figuring out how they can earn money based on their skills, what they like to do, and what help friends and family need--such as yard work. They are then asked to come up with ideas to earn money and to project how much they might make in a week and a month.

Over the next few pages, your kids will read about calculating the real cost of something they want and learning to make a choice when spending their money. Kids learn the difference between wanting something and needing something and what is known as an opportunity cost.

Next, kids create a budget--balancing income against expenses. This section, like many of the others, comes complete with a worksheet.

The activity book ends with a section on saving--defining a goal and coming up with a plan to save toward that goal.

The booklet includes a certificate so children can celebrate when they complete the activities.

A version of the book is also available in Spanish. To learn more or to order a free copy of the book, visit the website at www.clevelandfed.org/learning center or call (216) 579-3188.