What are good games to play to teach young children about saving money?
"I found this great resource at MarketWatch.com - a listing on online games that help parents teach kids about saving and finance, set up by age group. Here's an example of some of the content: For children six to nine: www.fleetkids.com, sponsored by the Fleet Bank, has great games -- like ""Buy lo, Sell hi"" and ""Chunka Change"" -- that teach kids about spending and saving. Kids can compete for prizes such as computers and backpacks for their schools." "I've found that good old fashioned ""Monopoly"" teaches children about cash flow, mortgaging properties, and paying income taxes." I know this question is closed now, but I just found this site that people might be interested in... http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/games/ I also saw a lot of reference to Mutual Mania Board Game, which is geared towards kids 11yrs+ and helps them learn about spending, saving, profit and loss. We play Cash Flow and Cashflow for Kids by Robert Kiyosaki. Our kids love it. Animal Crossing is great for all ages and teaches kids the importance of saving money to pay off a debt for a home and to become successful by helping out the community and what it gets you.
Are your kids playing video games? Don’t worry, they aren’t wasting time and energy passively staring at the screen and pressing buttons if you convert this pass time into a creative outlet, fostering their imagination! Game design is what we are talking about and your child needs not be a skilled programmer or computer expert to start. Below you will find all game design information to give a creative and entertaining experience to your child. Checkout us online: http://stemandeducation.greatwebsitebuilder.com/blog/your-complete-guide-to-all-game-design-information "Envelope budgeting is pretty simple. It's easy enough that you can teach it to children, and flexible enough you can use it as an adult.   The general idea is that you take your cash money (no bank accounts involved in the simple version), and stick it in envelopes marked for what it's supposed to be for. So for example, you get paid, you cash your paycheck and you put $100 in an envelope marked food.  Now when you go out to eat, you go get the money out of your food envelope, and spend it on food.  When your food envelope is empty you go hungry.   In the simple version you have envelopes for things like ""food"", ""candy"", ""toys"", ""games"". etc. (simple version is usually taught to kids.)  So you want a $60 game, and your game envelope only has $5. Well you can't get the game. You need to add more money to the game envelope. You need to eat so you have to put money there, but maybe you don't need toys. So you can divert some incoming money from toys to games. Sure it's still going to take a while to get to $60, but now with some simple kid friendly math you can see how long, and more importantly, you can make decisions on what is more important. Candy or Toys? In the adult version things are much the same. We just have more envelopes. We have Rent, Car Payment, Gas, Food, Electric. Then we need some envelopes for ""savings"" and ""retirement"". etc. Now when you get your Paycheck you prioritize your money and you stuff it in the envelopes. How much you put in each envelope is easy. Enough to pay for that thing. Savings and Retirement meet different goals. You want $6,000 savings. Well just like that game in the kid version, you're not going to get there all at once.  But you can see and make decisions on what is most important. You want $1,000,000 to retire on. Sure, but that envelope is going to take a while to fill up.  At it's core, the important parts are that: Let me explain the rent example, as it's the oddest.  You get $500 a week, and you need $1000 for rent.  This means you're spending from your envelopes. During week 1 and 2 you're spending last months week 3 and 4.  You DO NOT do: This is important because if you lose your paycheck in week 3 or 4 you are homeless.  Finally, in general, you stick stuff in savings envelope. And you want to reach a savings envelope goal of 6 months of your average pay checks. Once you reach this goal, then you're in good shape, and a job loss doesn't mean you're homeless. You can always just pull from savings.  It's important when using these envelopes to understand that you only make the decision of what is more important when you're sticking money in, not when you're taking money out, and that you only work with the money you have right now today (in your hand). Now what you think you're going to get tomorrow.  Money in the bank can be split into virtual envelopes. Money in savings can be in any vehicle, but generally you want a short term emergency envelope (savings account) and a long term envelope (CDs for example). Take a look at YNAB.com they used to provide free lessons in using their software to manage an envelope system.  And the I know it's going to get comments section.  The rent v.s. homeless is a real example. You should not take money from, say, the food envelope, to cover the rent. This may seem silly, but if you're doing that then you made poor decisions when deciding where the money goes. Use the emergency fund envelope to cover the rent, and next time put less money into food. It's this ""rule"" that makes envelope budgeting work well. You may be homeless, but you can eat, drive to work, put gas in your car, and pay your bills. Taking money from different envelopes usually results in a spiral, where you attempt to do the sensible thing, but in the end, you're worse off.  Migrating to envelope budgeting (in the strict sense) is hard. The best way I have taught people to do it is to only envelope budget an increasing part of their income until their envelopes are full enough for one month. That means that you might only envelope budget 10% of your income at first. But unless your situation is such that you can cover all your bills with one paycheck, it's not going to be possible to transition without breaking the ""don't take money from other envelope"" rules." "If the government prints money recklessly and causes inflation, people will come to expect inflation, and the value of the currency will plummet, and you'll end up like Zimbabwe where a trillion dollars won't buy a loaf of bread.  If the government actually pays people for the money they borrow, they don't have this problem - and as it turns out, the US government can get pretty good rates on borrowing in general, in part because they're extraordinarily good about paying them back. (Also, inflation expectations are low, so people will accept 1-2% interest rates. If you expected inflation of 10%, you'd see people demanding something more like 12% interest rates.) (The downside of too much of this sort of borrowing is that it ""crowds out"" other borrowing, which may harm the economy. Who would lend money to / invest in a small business, if the government is paying good money and there's almost no risk at all?) Now, inflation can come into play afterward, if the Fed decides it needs to maintain ""easy money"" policies to stimulate the economy (because taxes are too high because we're paying off the debt, or because we've crowded out smaller borrowers, or something). -- In general, you can count on the the principle that if you, as the government, try to play too many games with people's money... well, people aren't stupid; they will eventually catch on, and adjust their behavior to compensate, and then you're right back where you started, but with less trust." Yes, there are times when co-signing is the right choice. One is when you know more about the person than the loan issuer does. Consider a young person who has just started working in a volatile field, the kind of job where you can be told on Friday that you only get one shift next week but things might pick up the week after, and who makes maybe $12 an hour in that job. You've done the math and with 40 hour weeks they can easily afford the loan. Furthermore, you know this person well and you know that after a few weeks of not enough shifts, they've got the gumption to go out and find a second job or a different job that will give them 40 hours or more a week. And you know that they have some savings they could use to ensure that no payments will be missed even on low-wage weeks. You can cosign for this person, say for a car loan to get them a car they can drive to that job, knowing that they aren't going to walk away and just stop making the payments. The loan issuer doesn't know any of that.  Or consider a young person with poor credit but good income who has recently decided to get smart about money, has written out a budget and a plan to rehabilitate their credit, and who you know will work passionately to make every payment and get the credit score up to a place where they can buy a house or whatever their goal is. Again, you can cosign for this person to make that happen, because you know something the lender doesn't. Or consider a middle aged person who's had some very hard knocks: laid off in a plant closing perhaps, marriage failure, lost all their house equity when the market collapsed, that sort of thing. They have a chance to start over again somewhere else and you have a chance to help. Again you know this isn't someone who is going to mismanage their money and walk away from the payments and leave you holding the bag. If you would give the person the money anyway (say, a car for your newly graduated child) then cosigning instead gives them more of a sense of accomplishment, since they paid for it, and gives them a great credit rating too. If you would not give the person the entire loan amount, but would make their payments for many months or even a year (say, your brother's mortgage for the house where he lives with a sick wife and 3 small children), then cosigning is only making official what you would have done anyway.  Arrange with the borrower that if they can't make their payments any more, you will backstop them AND the item (car, house, whatever) is going up for sale to cover your losses. If you don't think you could enforce that just from the strength of the relationship, reconsider co-signing. Then sign what you need to sign and step away from it. It's their loan, not yours. You want them to pay it and to manage it and to leave you out of it until it's all paid off and they thank you for your help. If things go south, you will have to pay, and it may take a while for you to sell the item or otherwise stop the paying, so you do need to be very confident that the borrower is going to make every single payment on time. My point is just that you can have that confidence, based on personal knowledge of character, employment situation, savings and other resources, in a way that a lender really cannot. "The real betrayal is that the so-called education system can't be bothered to teach people anything useful.   I had a ""bank book"" (savings account) in *fifth grade*. We learned to operate checking accounts in sixth, and compound interest the next year.   What happened?" The software he is talking about readjusts your portfolio weights back to your original allocation on a semi-constant basis. Basically it's designed to replace the stereotypical, lazy financial advisor.  Your second point is quite valid though... One such example for anyone reading who has a young child is a coverdell ESA which allows you to put pretax income into an investment fund and withdraw tax free to spend on anything education related including the primary and secondary level (ie books, Supplies, field trips, tutoring, etc.). Basically money youd probably spend anyway, but this way you skip out on some taxes. It might help the poster if you recommended some of those? I recommended the ones I know of specifically in that field I know to be good. Perhaps you could do the same?  I also really like the books in this list:  http://www.fool.com/Specials/2000/sp001107a.htm  Note, Gorilla Game is, IMO the weakest of the bunch. "Envelope budgeting is pretty simple. It's easy enough that you can teach it to children, and flexible enough you can use it as an adult.   The general idea is that you take your cash money (no bank accounts involved in the simple version), and stick it in envelopes marked for what it's supposed to be for. So for example, you get paid, you cash your paycheck and you put $100 in an envelope marked food.  Now when you go out to eat, you go get the money out of your food envelope, and spend it on food.  When your food envelope is empty you go hungry.   In the simple version you have envelopes for things like ""food"", ""candy"", ""toys"", ""games"". etc. (simple version is usually taught to kids.)  So you want a $60 game, and your game envelope only has $5. Well you can't get the game. You need to add more money to the game envelope. You need to eat so you have to put money there, but maybe you don't need toys. So you can divert some incoming money from toys to games. Sure it's still going to take a while to get to $60, but now with some simple kid friendly math you can see how long, and more importantly, you can make decisions on what is more important. Candy or Toys? In the adult version things are much the same. We just have more envelopes. We have Rent, Car Payment, Gas, Food, Electric. Then we need some envelopes for ""savings"" and ""retirement"". etc. Now when you get your Paycheck you prioritize your money and you stuff it in the envelopes. How much you put in each envelope is easy. Enough to pay for that thing. Savings and Retirement meet different goals. You want $6,000 savings. Well just like that game in the kid version, you're not going to get there all at once.  But you can see and make decisions on what is most important. You want $1,000,000 to retire on. Sure, but that envelope is going to take a while to fill up.  At it's core, the important parts are that: Let me explain the rent example, as it's the oddest.  You get $500 a week, and you need $1000 for rent.  This means you're spending from your envelopes. During week 1 and 2 you're spending last months week 3 and 4.  You DO NOT do: This is important because if you lose your paycheck in week 3 or 4 you are homeless.  Finally, in general, you stick stuff in savings envelope. And you want to reach a savings envelope goal of 6 months of your average pay checks. Once you reach this goal, then you're in good shape, and a job loss doesn't mean you're homeless. You can always just pull from savings.  It's important when using these envelopes to understand that you only make the decision of what is more important when you're sticking money in, not when you're taking money out, and that you only work with the money you have right now today (in your hand). Now what you think you're going to get tomorrow.  Money in the bank can be split into virtual envelopes. Money in savings can be in any vehicle, but generally you want a short term emergency envelope (savings account) and a long term envelope (CDs for example). Take a look at YNAB.com they used to provide free lessons in using their software to manage an envelope system.  And the I know it's going to get comments section.  The rent v.s. homeless is a real example. You should not take money from, say, the food envelope, to cover the rent. This may seem silly, but if you're doing that then you made poor decisions when deciding where the money goes. Use the emergency fund envelope to cover the rent, and next time put less money into food. It's this ""rule"" that makes envelope budgeting work well. You may be homeless, but you can eat, drive to work, put gas in your car, and pay your bills. Taking money from different envelopes usually results in a spiral, where you attempt to do the sensible thing, but in the end, you're worse off.  Migrating to envelope budgeting (in the strict sense) is hard. The best way I have taught people to do it is to only envelope budget an increasing part of their income until their envelopes are full enough for one month. That means that you might only envelope budget 10% of your income at first. But unless your situation is such that you can cover all your bills with one paycheck, it's not going to be possible to transition without breaking the ""don't take money from other envelope"" rules."