The Great Money Experiment.

 

This is the follow up to my previous post entitled: Do you teach your kids about money?

 

Thanks again to Nathan Munro for this suggestion 

 

To follow up my previous post my daughter had set a goal for her business of buying a Barbie house worth $250. We decided that she has to save half of whatever she earns so if her goal is $250 then she needs to generate $500! Thus began the great money experiment.

 

We knew we had a lofty goal but we also gave ourselves 10 months to achieve it. Addie decided that she wanted to continue to make cupcakes for her business.  We broke her goal down into dollars/month, and then figured out how many dozen cupcakes that would be and how much she would need to pay to buy all the ingredients for all of those cupcakes. 

 

She also hung a big color picture of her Barbie house goal up as a constant reminder of what she was working for. With the generous orders from friends family and a few strangers my daughter destroyed her goal earning $750 in just 6 months!

 

We decided that to buy her Barbie house early would be more than fair given the crazy amount of work she has put in 

 

I’m so impressed by her effort. Shes learning some awesome new skills and her math and reading have benefited greatly. She’s become very confident and competent. 

 

We will continue to learn and grow her money. It’s completely reasonable given the power of compound interest that this money could serve her for her entire life. 

 

Stay tuned for what the next phase of growth will be. We are pondering some proper investment along with new business ideas in order to help grow her money even more.

 

As an update we have now decided that money has 4 jobs (not 3). They are: spending, saving, investing, and donating. For donating we’ve been talking about how we can help others with money by giving it away. We asked our daughter “How  do you want to help the world?” and with the help of “Our Planet” on Netflix she has decided to donate to the World Wildlife Fund. I told her that whatever she gives I will match and collectively we have donated $160 usd.

 

Im excited about what more we will learn together as we pursue our money project. I’m really looking forward to when my son can begin to learn as well. This is giving me a healthy respect for not only the jobs money has but more importantly my attitude around it. Money is just a tool yet we don’t teach anyone how to use it. Would you let your kids use a drill without proper guidance? Of course not! So why don’t we learn about this in school? I guess it’s not as useful on a daily basis as a whole year of the industrial revolution.