Teaching your children how to Budget their allowance Training Outline: One of the most important things to teach

a child is how to budget money. They should learn how to save money for an item that they would like. They should also learn how to properly spend their money, or have a reserve fund as well. The child should be able to create a simple budget plan to track savings and spending. This will also teach children to break up their expense into time frames to be able to obtain certain items Training Process: (This process is an expansion of the process Teaching your children how to Budget) 1. Explain to your children that today the focus will be on budgeting real money a. We will focus on saving for the short-term, mid-term, and/or long-term 2. Have your child write down the amount they receive in their allowance per week a. The child will add in birthday money, holiday money, and any other extra money, when they get it 3. Discuss with your child how your allowance is weekly money, and that the other money is considered a gift a. This means that they will not receive gift money on a regular basis 4. Make suggestions to your child and allow them to decide how they want to divide their money: Short-term, mid-term, long-term, and savings a. Provide them with options: i. Do they want to put a certain dollar amount aside per allowance ii. Do they want to put a percentage of money aside per allowance iii. How do they want to divvy up their gift money 5. After allowing your child to think about this, have him/her write it down on paper to see the split of money a. If they chose percentages, this would be a great intervention to teach them a math lesson on how to compute with percentages 6. Now, have your child write down some items that they want short-term, mid-term, and longterm a. This will be the only money you will work with now. The money the child put in savings is out of the equation. The goal here is to teach them that they should not touch that money because it is only for an absolute emergency 7. Compare the price of the item to the amount of money they set aside for that period of time

8. Conclude by discussing with your child how they can always return to their budget and maneuver money around between the short-term, mid-term, and long-term breakdown 9. Make sure to reinforce with your child that the amount they have decided to put in savings should NOT be lower than the original amount. They can always put more money in, but NEVER less