Money Minded Families

8Principles of Money Management: Spend

Financial resources should be used as a means toward achieving self-actualization. If you want to evaluate your priorities, take a look at your checkbook. Does your spending align with your values?

Conscious spending requires an understanding of what is important to you, controlling cash, and living in a place of self-sufficiency. Developing this conscious understanding and clarity not only helps to remove the emotions from financial decision making, but also prevents mindless spending, which often leads to a negative net worth and bad debt. Teaching our kids to plan their spending from a young age will help them become financially well later in life.

Consider that we teach our children math in the classroom, yet they often don't know how to apply the concepts in their daily lives. How many times have your children asked why they need to do their math problems? I realized when Jacob was young that while he learned math skills well, he was not able to apply the skills in real life. Schoolteachers can only do so much. Enter our role as parents in the real world.

To help Jacob apply his math skills in daily life, I try to make buying experiences a lesson on budgeting and finance. Tween and teen years are a great time to start these lessons.

When Jacob was 11, we took a holiday trip to Mt. Tremblant and Montreal, Canada. As a family, we decided that our financial and personal resources are better spent doing things together instead of buying ...