How To Involve Your Kids in Saving Money

Saving money with a family is hard enough but it becomes almost impossible if you don’t include the whole family in the process. When your kids are small, it’s easier but as they get older it gets harder. They ask for things that upset you and they don’t understand why it’s a big deal if you don’t tell them. It can be rough. This brings us to our first step in involving your kids with saving money.

1.) Explain Why You’re Saving

Talk to your kids. Tell them why you need/want to save money. Make it simple enough to understand. When you write your financial goal list, it should be extremely specific goals. You can easily tell your kid the next goal on the list. We started with we need to pay off this credit card. Currently, we are saving for travel and we have set a specific dollar amount that we are working towards. Our kids have been aware of all of this.

2.) Let Them Track Progress

We used debt payoff trackers when paying down our credit cards. We easily found free ones online and put them in a binder. We did a previous post about our Debt Binder. Once we paid everything off, we made our own savings trackers specific to our personal goals. We have our kids help us make them and color them in as we hit each small goal on our tracker.

3.) Have Celebration Points

We set up small celebration points throughout our journey. After each credit card we paid off, we would treat ourselves to something small. We did an ice cream cone night, a make your own sundae night, dinner at a restaurant, everybody gets one new useful item that they have been wanting (think a sweatshirt, jeans, socks, etc), an inexpensive outing, or a new game for board game night. These little treats are decided on in advance and help all of us to focus. This works best with kids if you talk about it a lot. Discuss what ice cream flavor they want. Research all the board game options. The building excitement of attaining something is one of the things that has been lost over the generations. The instant gratification that comes with the way we live and shop in this modern-day has been linked repeatedly to declining happiness. Give that excitement back to your family. It has made a huge difference in mine.

4.) Ask Them For Ideas

We have frequent family meetings. We have found that our family does better with informal chats at dinner or in the car for most things. We have occasional formal meetings for important things. These are for discussing the big stuff. When we made the decision as a family to travel full-time, that was at a meeting. Everybody gets notice of these meetings so that they are prepared. You don’t want anybody distracted by their phones or feeling caught off guard. I give a 15-minute warning so everybody can get a drink or use the bathroom if needed. When we started our debt-free journey, we had a meeting to explain what changes we would need to make and more importantly, why we needed to make those changes. We asked our kids to give us any suggestions they had for spending less. We were impressed by our girls once again. They came up with so many little ways to cut back. They started turning off lights, suggesting combining trips, picking out cheaper snacks so we would be under budget on groceries, not pestering to buy things that they didn’t need, making do with things that likely needed to be replaced sooner, and about a million more little things I never would have thought of.

5.) Get Them As Involved As They Want To Be

This is the most important piece. Let them be as involved as they want to be. All our kids were supportive but on different levels. Isabella loves helping with things. She happily sat at the kitchen table rolling coins with me. She asked loads of questions when we were on our debt-free journey. Ivy helped cook meals at home so we would spend less. It made a huge difference. Everything is easier when everybody is on board but it’s possible even if you have a straggler or two.

We used these five ways to become debt-free and continue to use them now. Good Luck with your money-saving journey! It’s not easy but nothing worth doing is.