5 Fun Apps that Teach Children Wealth Management Principles

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There are numerous apps that teach children how to manage money and investment portfolios. Here are five best apps I found that I believe are worthwhile for your children to play.

Green$treets: Unleash the Loot!

Green$treets: Unleash the Loot! is a game based in the city of Green$treets. Kids rescue animals, feed and play with the animals they rescue, and then give them back to their owners. Children can earn money by growing gardens or by catapulting items they find into their very own tree house. There is a monster in the game who tries to stop them from what they are doing, but kids can escape him with proper planning and strategy. Kids can buy decor for their tree house or attire for their animals. This game teaches children how to earn and spend money, escape pitfalls in the search for more money, and treat other living creatures with care.

SavingSpree

SavingSpree shows kids, ages seven and up, how saving money every day or long term affects their ability to buy things they want or need, such as a new bike or college education. They have a certain amount of money and are able to save, spend, donate, or invest the money. It also shows them how work can earn them money and how there are certain things out of their realm of control that costs money. So, it teaches children that saving extra money just in case is a smart thing to do. They get rewarded for each smart choice they make. Their skills are developed through a game show that is run by a money-saving pig character. They are tested on their financial knowledge and rewarded with skills when they answer the questions correctly.

Kids Money

Kids Money is like a budgeting tracker, such like Mint is for adults. It helps kids keep track of the money they earn/are given and helps them to see when they will have the money to purchase things they want in real life. It allows for them to input numbers and receive information and graphics about their money. It’s fun and useful to teach older children how to save and use money and change wisely.

Motion Math: Cupcake!

Motion Math: Cupcake! is a game that allows children to own their own cupcake business and evaluate the costs and rewards of doing so. They get to create cupcakes individually and see how much each topping and ingredient costs to make the cupcake. They get to set a price for the cupcake and then either sell them out of the shop or deliver them around town. Children get to accumulate points/money by selling the cupcakes. It’s a great game to teach children that creating and selling products costs money up front but rewards them in the end. It is a great way to teach them about basic business principles, as well.

Renegade Buggies

Renegade Buggies give you a character with a shopping cart and you have to race around the streets of the town to collect as much money, gifts, and prizes as possible. Once you earn enough rewards, you make purchases at the grocery store and can purchase racing gear for your “buggy.” This is a great way to teach children that money can be fun to earn, but it is important to save in order to get the things they need to move forward.

These apps are user-friendly and provide an experience for your children to learn the basics of wealth management. They are fun and highly interactive. Some of the games are better for younger children, such as Green$treets: Unleash the Loot!, while other games are better for older children, such as Kids Money. Introduce your children to these games, and they will have a blast learning to be financially responsible!

7 Money Camps that Ensure a Child’s Safe Financial Future

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In today’s educational system, is it now required in 80% of states to have some sort of financial education. Paul Sullivan of the New York Times states, “A study published in 2009 by two researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, called “Teachers’ Background and Capacity to Teach Personal Finance,” found… that most teachers did not feel qualified to teach a financial literacy course.” When we are entrusting the entirety of our children’s financial literacy to teachers who do not know how to teach about finances, it is important to take matters into our own hands. Knowing how to manage our own finances is absolutely vital to a stable and healthy life. This starts to show when people do not handle their finances well, and they get themselves into debt without any investments to help support them.

Sullivan goes on to share the importance of financial literacy for children so that they can deal with financial issues as they grow. Some say that going to financial camps as children do not stick well enough in children’s minds, but Lewis Mandell says differently:

“Lewis Mandell, a professor of finance and dean emeritus at the State University of New York, Buffalo, who has done research on financial literacy for children, said,… ‘The literature shows that kids may not remember [teachings about what happens when you practice poor financial skills], but when they become adults and get to practice a range of financial activities, it comes back.’”

If it is true that the memories of financial camp do come back, then that means children who go to these camps will be that much more likely to handle their finances in an informed and educated manner.

Most money camps aim to integrate children from all socioeconomic backgrounds to deal with financial issues that they may or may not have in their own lives. Some children are given anywhere from $30,000 – $120,000 to manage per year. This starts to show them that having or not having money can be a difference of stability or no stability as they grow up. Not all money camps are like this, however. Some are invite-only. Here is a list of money camps one can check out for their children this summer, which are the following:

  1. Camp Start-Up
  2. Camp Millionaire
  3. Moolah U
  4. My Life, My Money
  5. Wall Street Summer Camp
  6. Young American’s Center for Financial Education
  7. Invite-Only Camps

There are camps that are invite only. These camps are created for the children of millionaires by companies such as Merrill Lynch, Citi Bank, and HSBC. There is a rich camp held at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for $10,000.00. They are sometimes, “offered as a free service or marketing tool for big clients. The price of admission: to qualify, families must hold investable assets between $25 million and $100 million.” These camps are secretive, as they do not want to divulge who has what amount of money to the public.

No matter which camp we send our children to, there is something fun and exciting at each of them. There are ways for children to work in a certain “industry” for the week that is interesting to them, while others enjoy the games they get to play, while at the camp. Regardless, financial camps can be absolutely essential for children as they grow up and learn to make, spend, and invest their own money.

Use This Organization’s Tools to Teach Your Children About Money

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In my last post, I spoke about the importance of early financial education. I recently learned of a terrific organization, the National Financial Educators Council (NFEC), that focuses entirely on this topic. Here’s their mission statement: “The National Financial Educators Council (NFEC) is creating a world where people are informed to make qualified financial decisions that improve their lives. We provide financial education resources, promote advocacy campaigns, and help organizations build sustainable financial education programs.” I have to tell you, just reading those words gives me hope for the financial future of our children – and here’s why.

Erica Hill

Teaching your children money management skills early on will make them fiscally responsible adults.

In focusing on creating a standardized financial curriculum, NFEC is addressing a real and dangerous problem in our country: the absence of anything even closely resembling a financial education in our schools. Quite frankly, it’s unacceptable that we are still prioritizing esoteric and unnecessary knowledge, like micro-details of the average Bronze Age Mesopotamian’s diet, over important, real-life knowledge, like how to avoid accruing debt, how to write a resume, and how to create and follow a budget.

People wonder how the Financial Crisis of 2008 could have happened. To me, it’s quite obvious that this stock market crash was a direct result of the fact that most Americans knew next-to-nothing about how to responsibly manage their finances, or why it would be a terrible idea to do things like take out four mortgages on one house. If we want to prevent another financial crisis caused by the same national Achilles’ heel from happening, it is imperative that we start teaching our children the skills they’ll need to become fiscally responsible adults as early as possible. Based on my fervency about this subject, you can imagine how pleased I was to learn that NFEC’s curriculum starts at the pre-school level, when the organization advises that children should be taught basic concepts of numbers, time, money and income, value, market and exchange, choice, and social values.

If you’d like to learn more about the NFEC’s advised curriculum or the opportunities they provide for guided financial education, head over to their website at financialeducatorscouncil.org. Your children will thank you for it one day. 

The Strong Case for Early Financial Education

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As any parent of a school-aged child can attest to, one topic that is conspicuously absent from most school curriculums is personal finance. Despite the fact that understanding one’s financial responsibilities is a basic life skill, for some reason, it is not only a topic that is rarely covered in the classroom, but it is one that is barely discussed at all until adulthood, by which time it is often too late to instill smart habits for money management without the added stress of having to apply these lessons in real time to real bills that are mounting by the day.

I am a strong proponent of the belief that we should start to educate our children about finances as early as possible, thereby demystifying the world of money management and imparting valuable advice that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. All too often, though, the process of getting the ball rolling on a financial education is so daunting that parents don’t know where to start. When we talk about a financial education and developing financial literacy, then, it helps to break the topic down into 4 areas of knowledge:

Erica Hill Real Estate

Teach financial literacy by turning money management into a game.

  1. How a person makes money
  2. How to manage the money you’ve made
  3. How to invest your money to turn it into even more money, and  
  4. How to donate your money.

Each of these topics opens a dialogue about much broader issues that children should be exposed to early on. For example, if you’re teaching your child how a person makes money, you can introduce her to the topic of work salaries and how her paychecks will be taxed before she receives them. When it comes to imparting wisdom about how to manage the money you’ve made, you can use this opportunity to teach your child about the importance of saving, how to financially plan ahead for her future and why and how to avoid the trap of falling into credit card debt. And while investing is often considered to be the purview of the rich, this is not only misguided, but also causes millions of people to lose out on potential income every year. We can correct this perception by teaching our children about investing in the form of a game, which will both demystify the process of investing and make it an appealing prospect to children from all socio-economic stratas. Finally, with financial education, we have the power to raise future generations who will view donating to charity not as a luxury, but as a mandatory component of money management, thereby creating a world in which charities and nonprofits have a much larger pool of funds to pull from to do good.

The fact of the matter is, only time will tell if these important lessons are incorporated into school curriculums. Until that day comes, it is our responsibility as parents to teach our children about finance in the home if we want to re-shape the way we as a society understand how to manage our money and put a stop to the financial ignorance that is causing so much of the world’s economic problems today.