I grind, you grind
School, chores, allowance? Yes. Lather, rinse, repeat. It is a grind, but that’s OK. Life is about learning to find balance within that grind. I had a boss who said, “You grind for me; I’ll grind for you.”
In fact, he said that to us in the context of how he told his (at the time) 12-year-old daughter to handle her business. He told her
“I’m grinding for you every day. All I ask is that you grind for me too and we’ll meet together throughout the week.”
Combine all these lessons into one, and give your kids a list of chores each day and/or week, then pay them an allowance to help them learn to have money and manage it. I think it correlates perfectly to the real world. Whether you’re running your own business or working for someone, you work—you get money.
If you don’t like working for a living, save your money and make it work for you. If you save enough money and invest it wisely, eventually you can let it do some or all the working for you. Money doesn’t grow on trees, but as I will show you, you can plant a money tree for yourself by knowing a few simple things.
Help kids find the entrepreneur within
Kids have great imaginations. If left alone in a room with nothing, they will come up with new games on their own. If you teach them about money, you’ll be surprised how quickly they become entrepreneurial.
I’ve watched my kids try to develop different businesses with various levels of success. My daughter (and youngest) used her earnings to build a baking business with a friend. Both homeschooled, they decided to use their flexible schedule to bake cupcakes between the end of their lessons and the end of public school. They then set up shop on the sidewalk between the neighborhood and the school and sold them to the public-school kids on their way home.
Not to be outdone, our middle son found a better way. He biked to Target, bought a bulk pack of Smarties and Snickers bars, and sold
them individually on the same sidewalk. Why put all that work into cupcakes when you can make a bigger margin on someone else’s work?
Later, the scene at dinner was similar to any mafia-head famiglia meeting ever held. There was discussion of who owned what territory on what days.
In the end they never reached much of a conclusion because none of them really wanted to work every day anyhow. After a few days, the work started to feel like work, plus they ended up eating most of their profits.
What’s the point in telling this story? Giving the kids a financial base gave them the understanding of money to help them think about how a business works and how to use that knowledge to build something bigger with those resources.
Encourage your kids to be entrepreneurial. It helps them begin to incorporate the concept into their daily activities, whether it be playing make-believe or actually trying to start their own little business. It helps them begin to speak the language.
Click Follow to receive emails when this author adds content on Bublish
Comment on this Bubble
Your comment and a link to this bubble will also appear in your Facebook feed.