Do You Encourage The Spend/Save/Share Model, And Other Money Questions

Have you seen the money related conversation starter cards circulating in the social media lately?

It is the Financial Service Council NZ teaming up with Hatch investment platform who brings us these downloadable cards that each have a money related question to answer.

I thought I’d do a post series of personally answering a few of these questions in each post and inviting you to share your own answer to the same question in the comments! You can download your own set here.

How do you talk about your financial situation with your kids?

Well, currently my kids are still fairly young so we don’t really go to any lengths to talk to them about it, yet!

But I do plan to talk to them about our financial situation and share it to a quite a good degree with them.

I will probably start this around early teens, or pre-teens, depends on what they are like in that age.

The introduction to it would be just to share the family budget, how much living really costs for us, and what we have had to do to get where we are financially at that stage.

For example how we managed to buy our house and re-build (this conversation is about 10 years away, so I’m really hoping we have built our house by then!).

Soon after that I will probably share my KiwiSaver and other investment portfolio with them and regularly show how it works.

I also plan to share with them my own financial plans and how I plan to reach them.

How do you talk to your kids about their future and what role money plays in that?

Like with the previous question, my kids are still very young, so I don’t currently talk about this with them, but boy will I as they grow up!

Some of the topics I will be covering with them are:

• How to save money and why it is important
• How to save money and why it is important
• Budgeting and what it costs to live a life that you want
• Career considerations, tertiary education and how to fund it and so forth
• Money in relationships
• Understanding the impact of parenthood on your finances
• The concept of financial freedom
• And so on

I’m actually really looking forward to teaching them about money! Talking about it is such a big passion of mine.

Do you encourage the spend/save/share model for kids money?

Same as with the previous questions, we are not quite there yet because of their age.

But I will be implementing this model in some form or another!

I think it will show the importance of balance when it comes to money. Some for now, some for the future and also teach how good it feels to support causes you believe in.

I haven’t quite decided how I will do it, give them percentage split or just set the rule that some needs to go towards each but how much would be up to them.

You can find my other answers to money questions here.

I’d love to hear your answers to these questions in the comments below!