Giving our children the knowledge of financial matters since the beginning of their seventh age is quite crucial point to do. Starting from their sixth age, they joined elementary school, started to think, socialized themselves, and found a lot of new things in their life. At this stage, they also started to deal with little penny of money as their pocket money. Start some financial guides with attractive financial games between parents and their kids will make them to be familiar with personal finances and very useful for kid’s future life.

A lot of game is able to do, but the most easy and simple way is to inure them with management of their pocket money. Usually, we give them some money to spend every day. Why don’t we start to let them manage their money for some longer period of time ?

I am doing such thing with my child.

I have one 8 years old son, and I am dealing for long term financial game with him. Usually, his mother gives him Rp 3.000,- daily pocket money (similar with around $0.3, sufficient amount for our 8 years old kid pocket money in our country). Starting from his 3th grade of his elementary school, we give him pocket money in weekly basis instead of daily basis. The Rp 15.000,- money (5 school days times Rp 3.000,- daily pocket money) is given at the beginning of each week. We give him a freedom to manage and spend his money by himself, and just give him important point that he may not spend more than Rp 15.000,- a week.

We suggest him not to spend all of his weekly money, but set aside some money for weekly saving, which will be saved in his own moneybox. Every weekend, when he sets aside some money, he has to note his saving on one particular book, so he will exactly know the amount of his money in the moneybox. This recording shall be done by time for any saving and withdrawing from his moneybox.

The game is, for the money saved every weekend, my wife will give him additional 10% extra money of his saving amount. So, bigger saving will lead to bigger weekly bonus.

How if during specific week his pocket money doesn’t sufficient (let say, the amount already zero on thursday) ? Of course, he can take another money from his moneybox, but as a consequence, his money amount will be reduced and he will not get any extra money at the weekend.

We are doing it continuously week by week until the end of school year period (end of May). At the end of may, we will count together the amount of his money, and I will give him yearly bonus which is 10 times of his money amount.

I also give him extreme example, in case he doesn’t spend even any penny of his pocket money, his money (including yearly bonus from me) can reach around Rp 9 millions (US$ 900). He will be able to spend all money for his school vacation, buy some toys, clothes, or anything he likes.

This kind of game seems quite interesting for my son, and he always be able to save some money every weekend. The most important thing for us, he enjoys this game !

From this game, I expect several things :

1. He will be familiar to manage his own weekly money instead of hope some daily money which will be spend out all during the day. Naturally, it will build his insight about money management, important part of his future live when he has some income and shall make periodic household budgeting along his mature period.
2. This game will make him familiar with financial goals. In this game, he has short term (weekly) goal and long term (yearly) goal. All of the goal is measurable to him. Implementing this game will make him familiar with financial planning activity.
3. Recording of saving and withdrawing will make him familiar with accountable budgeting. He will be use to note all of his spending and income, and as the future result, he can manage his own money in an organized way.
4. He can learn about “money make money” rule of thumb. In this game, larger money he can save can generate larger bonus. Similar rule also happened in our real life, when time value of money is happening, our bigger money will cause bigger passive income from some investment.

Of course, in this game I never and will never push him to save as much as possible from his pocket money, but I prefer to let it done by natural way. As long as this game still enjoyable for him, it will be good learning of personal finances, since we are trying to build his way of thinking about money, instead of the amount of money itself.

I believe, implementing some financial games to our children, and do it in natural way, will give a lot of good impact and benefit for their future lives instead of giving them a lot of money, since the art of money management is not built by amount of the money, but more by their pattern of thinking about money.

Tags: Financial Education, household budgeting, Personal Finance Management

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