Financial Education is a Parent’s Responsibility

All learning begins at home. The first step to financial freedom is debt management and elimination. If you pull your wallet or purse out, you’ll find that there are more charge cards than cash money. That should be the first sign that cash isn’t king, but debt is the dictator. Confessing your money mismanagement is the next step in debt management and elimination. But if you want to really leverage your lesson- do it in front of your children. Your humility will go a long way with them when you are unable to give them what they want. Confession can be good for the soul, your pocketbook and your children. Money mistakes can be a learning experience for the entire family.

Another great example is balancing the checkbook, creating a budget and monitoring debt reduction. When one credit card debt is retired, there should be a family celebration. Some families have taken debt reduction to a whole new level by retiring their mortgage and burning the paperwork as a family celebration. These events don’t require education, they require will execution. The event will imprint upon the psyche of your children and formulate a good foundation for their own financial profile and in turn help them create a healthy psychonomic attitude for their own future. Painful money mistakes, with a lesson learned, can be a powerful motivation for change and recovery from debt addiction.

One last remark: there’s a co-dependency that develops over a period of time spent accumulating possessions born out of our uncontrolled desires. It starts out with a spending spree, which develops into an unchecked spending, that evolves into an addiction. Generally speaking, only a cold turkey intervention can bring out of control spending to a grinding halt. Credit cards get cut. A massive garage sale ensues. And a lifestyle that is pared back must follow, with every ounce of budgetary fat eliminated.

If your financial adviser or insurance agent is unwilling to help you through your money problems then it’s time to find one who will.