money money money

According to Suze Orman in one of her shows, if you can't pay your credit card in full at the end of the month, that means you cannot afford to buy anything. Think for a moment.. how true it is.Decades ago, only a person with high income will be granted a credit card. It is not the same today. Fresh graduates can easily get credit cards once they started working. It is okay if you can control your spending and pay all your purchases at the end of the month. But how many young people can control the temptations of making purchases on the things that they want? Not many I'm afraid.

So, how do you teach your children the value of money? It is easy if you come from a poor family. Parents can easily teach their children that they have to be careful with their spending since they have little money to spend. But not so easy if you have money to spend. Nowadays children are so lucky. Some if not most, were born when their parents could already afford to have a house and a car. What the parents could not have during their time, they tend to make it up with their chilldren. Our children nowadays have monthly allowances, without having to do any chores. Money is easy to come by. This lead to them not respecting the value of money. So the credit cards problems crop up.

My youngest son said to me on his first day to school, ' mama, you do not have to give me any pocket money. I already have a million dollars', showing me his one dollar note. At his age I never thought that I have that much money, so how could he? I took it that children says the darnest thing less he thought that I have a lot of money. My eldest daughter used to be spendthrift during her school days, but that changed when she left home for her university studies. I told her to always save some of her allowances for rainy days. This habit of saving continues even after she started working 3 years ago. A wise man once told me,' A rich man is someone who has a lot of saving, not someone who earns a lot'. This culture of saving should be inculcated in our children since they are young. Let them use their own money to buy things.
Let them know the value of money when they are young than to have no respect for money when they are older.