A few months ago, around my son’s birthday, I tried to teach my son a financial lesson about savings.  Unfortunately, it was foiled by birthday money that he received.

For the past few years, my son was spending a lot of his allowance money on pokemon cards.  A few times he got disappointed because he wouldn’t have enough money to buy other things like Nintendo DS games, Legos and the like…  Of course, I would explain to him why he should save his money, but when we would talk about the interest gaining aspects, he never quite grasped the idea or at least he didn’t  until a few weeks ago.

You see, my son has converted from an impulsive spender to a thoughtful saver!  While I’m not entirely sure what brought out this change other than the example that my wife and I set, I’m impressed!

So yesterday, I decided to try to explained the financial lesson on savings again.  I pointed out how the interest gains can work with his saving dollars.  He understood the idea of interest this time around, especially the geometric (also called exponential) growth aspect.  When it’s my daughter’s time to learn this lesson, I think I’ll create a “what if analysis” spreadsheet as a fun interactive visual to the lesson!

My Son The Budget User?

My son created a type of budget journal!  It actually more like a checkbook balancing kind of journal, but he created it by without any help from adults!

The most important thing is showing encouragement for both this new activity, “Savings“, and the newly created system that my son created to help accomplish his new savings habit!

I created excel process to help me with my finances all the time.  Do you use spreadsheets or other such document to give you a leg up on finances or other decision-making processes?

-MR

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