My daughter's school has a canteen, similar to a cafeteria where students can purchase food to eat.
One day, she casually took money out of our coin bowl and proceeded to place it in her bag so that she can buy a slushie/slurpy at school.
It was at that moment that I realised it was time to teach my child about money!
She has three piggy banks in her room and I explained that we were going to use the piggy banks to categorise our money. We spoke about the three concepts: to #save, to #spend and to #give.
For each of the three concepts, I gave a real life example to ground her understanding.
For save, it was explaining that if she really want a special toy, you can't spend it all on your slushies. You need to save your money to buy that special thing you want.
For spend, well that's easy. Kind of comes naturally to most people! I explained that money in the "spend" section can be used for that slushie.
And for give, since our state in Australia is suffering from pretty severe drought, we talked about how giving money to the farmers would be a good thing to do. My daughter also suggested that she could give it to people who are less well off.
I gave her some post-it notes and we wrote those three words on three separate post-it notes:
Then we stuck it onto each of her piggy banks:
As an added incentive for her pocket money, I also tied in this idea of learning about money with chores - which she can earn 10c for each of her piggy banks per chore :) Is that too stingy? haha.
We are 30c in with each piggy bank at the moment - yay!
What do you do to teach your child about financial literacy?