Getting Your Teens Responsible About Their Finances
As a young man I struggled with the management of my finances. This was due in part to my father’s control and silence over the money I made from my neighborhood lawn-mowing gig. He would leave me with a couple dollars, take the bulk of the money I made, deposit it into a credit union account and that was that. No explanation and no conversation. And he almost dared me to suggest otherwise.
Then when I went to college he made a huge deposit into a checking account he set up for me. Pretty admirable…until I spent it all over the course of maybe two months. Then I moved on to the seductive lure of credit cards. There were signups everywhere I could see offering hundreds of dollars of credit for free! And I just had to have one of those Frisbees or squeegee bottles with some bank’s ugly logo on it. If I could go back in time I would slap myself silly for being so silly.
Understanding that these things can be cyclical (the sins of the father) I had a grand plan that I executed flawlessly. I was going to get my teenage son, a junior in high school, financially savvy by setting him up with a bank account and teaching him how to use it. In the fall of last year we marched into my bank and got him set up with a teen bank account, which is linked to my own. I would be able to manage it via computer and smart phone app. We set up an alert that would notify each of us when he had less than $25 in the bank and he’d get daily text messages of his daily balance. It doesn’t get any simpler than that, right?
Awesome!!! I pray that more parents will read and act upon this article. If one does not know how and want to learn about good financial management with todays technology, it is at one’s finger tips.