Teaching Your Teen About Finances
I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about money and the need for us to be teaching our high school students how to handle finances responsibly. Teaching your teen about finances is critical to their knowing how to handle money wisely & will make a huge difference in their lives when they graduate high school and are on their own in the real world.
Let me side-track for a moment….if you read Teaching Teens Real Life Money Skills: What We’re Doing, you’ll remember my “rant” about one of my pet peeves regarding young people not knowing how to make change. Well, it happened again last night. The bill was $5.81. I handed the cashier $6. She entered it into the register and it showed her she needed to give me .19 cents in change. Then… I did the unthinkable, I said, “Oh wait, I have a penny” and held it out. She looked at the register, said “Ah”, “Ah”…. “I can’t take it because I’ve already entered it into the computer and it shows me how much change to give you.” I just sighed and took my .19 cents. My grandkids were with me and were surprised. My grandson, with his sweet, sensitive heart, said “Maybe she’s just tired.” Yeah, maybe…
OK, end of rant and back to the topic at hand: our kids need to know how to handle money, especially in this economy. It’s part of life, a huge part. To help you with this, I came across a free online resource I want to share with you; it looks like fun. (Of course, all of us homeschooling parents know what looks like fun to us may likely elicit a loud groan from our kids 
– oh well.)
The website is called Making Ends Meet: A Comprehensive Budgeting Project. From their introduction:
You’ve just graduated from college and earned a bachelor’s degree. Your parents have told you to get a job and get out of the house. Welcome to the real world. In this WebQuest you will get a job in a new state, buy a car, find a place to live, develop and analyze a monthly budget and present your experiences to your peers.
If you are looking for a life-in-the-real-world study on real life money skills, Making Ends Meet could fit the bill (no pun intended ). The course uses free internet resources, and walks your student through real life scenarios.
If nothing else, it will show your highschooler how much it costs to live on their own. It could very well provide the motivation for them to take seriously the need to learn and begin to put into action good money management skills. To find out more, click here or on any of the Making Ends Meet links above.
Check it out & let me know what you think!
UPDATE: Just checking over this post & found that the link for “Making Ends Meet” is broken. My apologies for any inconveniences. At any rate, here are 2 other online resources that look like pretty good exercises to get a good idea of real life expenses. I think you fill them very helpful in teaching your teen about finances!
- Money Skills for Real Life : Contain exercises for junior high, high school & college ages
- You’re an Adult Now, Webquest
Both sites have projects re: cars, Housing, budgeting, etc. Let me know if you find these helpful!
May 28th, 2011 00:22
Great post. I used to work as a cashier at a grocery store and even if the math seems obvious, for the clerks it is difficult because you are probably their 400th customer and they are tired. There is so much math all day it would put anyone in a stupor and if their register is off–they get in trouble.
To you it is one penny but you are the 30th person to do that each day and some people try to rip the cashier off or do strange math. (We had some people who would give us extra change to reach something like $1.84 for toll money.) It really does add up. Cashiering is the worst job I’ve ever had–you physically hurt from standing in that small area for so long.
I personally believe real world math should be the basis of all math teaching. We make change every day why did we stop practicing that in elementary school and why did we start wasting our time learning trigonometry when we can’t even balance a checkbook? It really makes you wonder why public school curricula is so far removed from real world skills.