money management

Coffee chat: Fundraising Parents

| Patti Webb

My first fundraiser was in kindergarten. Our school was selling candy bars, and I don’t remember if I volunteered to take a box or was voluntold. But they were chocolate almond candy bars and I really liked those.

When I got home, that box of candy bars sat on the counter for a month. My mom had no clue why they were there and, in the end, she paid the minimum $20 just to cover it. Obviously, I didn’t win any top-seller prizes, but I did get to enjoy the candy bars.

Over my childhood, I had to sell Girl Scout cookies, pocket calendars, magazine subscriptions, pizza kits, program ads, and sponsored race miles. I went door-to-door by myself at 7 and never again after that. I’ve done phonathons, ran car washes, and organized parents’ weekends for my club teams.

Now with an advertising degree and a work history that includes actual advancement fundraising, I have the mad skillz take my daughters’ money-raising requirements to the next level. However, you still won’t catch me knocking on doors and cold-calling businesses.

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Not in this Mini-Economy

| Patti Webb

Last summer, we did a refresher post on Chores and Teaching Money Management. In mine and Mary’s households, we wanted to build in some type of money management structure because how money is handled now is vastly different than it was 30 years ago.

First, we don’t carry cash. I’m not actually sure how my kids think paying by card works. Any cash they directly receive comes from gifts and goes into a piggybank.

Second, I rarely give my kids the opportunity to spend money. That means, they don’t come with me running errands or stopping at Target. Whenever we do go shopping, or if we’re on vacation and they have the option to get a souvenir, they want EVERYTHING!!!

Obviously, how kids learn about money is going to be different from family to family. Learning about money management in school is also generally reserved for older kids. I remember a field trip we took in 8th grade about picking a job with a set salary and you had to make it through the month watching your budget and balancing your checkbook.

Through my work email, I got a Substack invite from Dr. Stephen Day, a Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Director of the VCU Center for Economic Education. He was hosting a webinar on how to use Bluey to teach kids economics. I loved this approach and his writing topics, so signed up for another webinar on Mini-Economy at Home.

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Money-Driven: Kids and Money Management

| Mary Stoffel, MOT, OTR/L

Welcome back to #throwbackmonth! For those not familiar, to get us back into the blog-writing groove for the month of July, we pick a past post each week to spotlight. Then we do a deeper dive on that topic to revisit the content and talk about some other things that may be related. On Tuesday, we picked our double post on Introducing Chores and Chores by Age.

When my son first started showing interest in helping around the house, I was ecstatic. Awesome, he wants to do chores. That means he’ll ALWAYS want to do chores. Haha, silly me.

Now that he’s 7, he groans when he’s reminded of his duties. Although he understands that chores are a part of his daily contribution to the household, he’d obviously much prefer to be doing something (anything) else. While research shows that chores provide positive outcomes for kids (like autonomy, self-control, empathy, and overall success), it can be difficult to get them to participate and WANT to do it. Jennifer Aniston wants you to WANT to do the dishes….

One motivator that we are all familiar with is paying our children for their hard work (aka an allowance). I’m sure we’ve all received payment for doing good deeds around the house, from doing dishes to maintaining a tidy bedroom. In fact, a survey conducted by the American Institute of CPAs found that 4 out of 5 adults say receiving an allowance taught them financial responsibility. But are money incentives really teaching responsibility? Yes, but not in the way you’d think.

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