Is it a good idea to teach children that work is linearly related to income?
I think that is the wrong approach. You certainly need to teach the value of work, but you cannot tie it to income levels as a hard and fast rule. If you do, how do you then explain athletes making millions per year and only 'working' half a year, at most. And, then comparing that person to a person working hard in a factory, 40-50 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, bringing home $50K per year? I've always taught my kids to work hard and with integrity. And, most importantly, you better enjoy the work you do because no matter how much money you make, if you dread getting up in the morning to go to work, your money won't make you happy. I've never focused on the amount of money they should be making. "Completely linear?  We don't do that. Our daughter has a fixed allowance, and we expect a certain amount of help around the house as being part of the family.  We don't make any explicit ties between the two, and we don't seem to have any problems. We bought an eBay lot of Polly Pockets and divided them up into $5 bags.  (This is a better deal that what we could get in the store new.)  Her allowance isn't enough that she can ""buy"" one every week. After sensing her frustration we gave her the opportunity to earn some more money by doing extra work.  It happened to be cleaning up after our dogs in the back yard, a chore we had neglected for quite a while.  She stuck with the job, and truly earned that money.  (She'll be six in January.)  What's more, it was a good deal for me.  It needed to be done, and I didn't really want to do it. :) So, for now this seems like a fair balance.  It prevents her from getting the idea that she won't work unless she gets paid, but she also knows that working harder does have its rewards. We still have time to teach her the idea of working smarter. (This isn't a formal study.  It's just my experience.)" "I don't know if it counts as a formal answer, but Dale Carnegie has  always preached that income is related to how well you treat and get  along with other people. His observation is that the highest paid  people are those with the best people skills, because the ability to  manage other people has higher value than singular ability.  Conversely, people making minimum wage often work ""harder"" than people  making more money.  The old saw about ""work smart, not hard"" is a bit trite. In many  fields, efficiency is valued over ""hard work""." As a parent I think you absolutely have to teach them that income is related to work because (for most people at least) it's a more fundamental principle than budgeting, investments, interest, etc. Once they've learned that the primary source of income is work, then you can start teaching them what to do with it, i.e. how to budget, economise, save, invest, etc. Get a copy of Capitalism for Kids - finally back in print (after being out of print for years). It's a great introduction to being an entrepreneur, aimed at young people. Six years old might be a bit early, though - but definitely before the teenage years. "My family instilled in me early on that hard work was important, and the output of that work was its reward. My grandparents really made in impression with me about telling the truth and being fair (probably after I was busted for lying and cheating about something) -- I remember my grandfather talking about the solem trust associated with shaking hands over something. I remember opening a savings account at school on bank day and being really excited about the interest accruing... but my folks never really allowed us to spend it on toys or other stuff. I didn't really think about money at all until I was probably about 10 or 11, when I started watching ""Wall Street Week"" on PBS with my dad on Friday night and bombarding him with dozens of questions. Then games like Sim City really got me going... my grandmother was always amazed that I was talking about bonding construction projects. I think that before 10 or so, kids needn't concern themselves with money, but should understand responsibility, the rewards that come from working hard, and the consequences for not doing so."
Nothing for nothing, everyone is given the opportunity to roll their tax refund into an IRA at tax time. Given the EIC such there is little reason most low income families with children couldn't max out for a few years early on in a target retirement fund. But buying stuff is a much more popular option i guess. I do not know why learning math of money is not given more focus in school rather than other trivial things... If these are children that may be employed, in a few years, it may well be worth walking them through some basics of the deductions around employment, some basic taxes, uses of banks, and give them enough of a basis in how the economy of the world works.  For example, if you get a job and get paid $10/hour, that may sound good but how much do various things eat at that so your take-home pay may be much lower?  While this does presume that the kids will get jobs somewhere along the way and have to deal with this, it is worth making this part of the education system on some level rather than shocking them otherwise. Rather than focusing on calculations, I'd be more tempted to consider various scenarios like how do you use a bank, what makes insurance worth having(Life, health, car, and any others may be worth teaching on some level), and how does the government and taxes fit into things. While I may be swinging more for the practical, it is worth considering if these kids will be away in college or university in a few years, how will they handle being away from the parents that may supply the money to meet all the financial needs? My friend runs a vocation school for high school students.  They have a number of programs where they teach specific machines and techniques to students and companies provide teaching, sponsorship, and hire students.  It is a win-win for the school, they get some machinery, a good relationship with a large company, and they get kids hired every year at a very good starting salary.  It isn't so specific that the kids are useless anywhere else, the companies just provide curriculum input on what is important. I received an allowance growing up.  There were stipulations on what I had to do with it that helped instill the values my parents wanted - in their case they were hoping to teach me to give money to my church, so I had a mandatory amount that I had to give when I received the allowance.  To this day I still give money to the church, so I guess it stuck. The allowance was tied to my doing some basic chores around the house - but loosely.  It wasn't a reward for doing those chores, but it would be taken away if I didn't do them.  Before I was of a legal working age I could do larger unusual tasks around the house for more money.   The relationship between chores and some form of allowance is, I think, tricky.  I don't think kids should be taught that the only reason to work is to earn money.  They won't earn money for keeping their future homes clean or by volunteering at the local food bank, but these are both good things to do.  At the same time it is good to teach that work has a reward and that lack of work means lack of a reward. My parents set up a savings account for me quite early.  Largely what went in there was birthday cash from relatives (a great thing to talk to any family members who might give your kids gifts about) and the income from my once-yearly sale of baked goods at a craft fair.  These were bigger amounts of money that I could take pride in depositing, and keeping them in a bank helped prevent me from spending them willy-nilly. I also got a credit card at the age of 16 (only allowed in some states in the US, not sure about internationally).  My parents oversaw my spending habits with it and made sure I always paid in full and on time.  The money I spent was tied to my summer work in high school and college.  I thought it was extremely valuable to learn how to manage a credit card before college when the card companies often seem to prey on young customers. Let's base teacher performance off of student value added growth scores!  Surely nothing bad will happen when we create incentivize teachers to make sure that student performance continuously rises.   I mean, Campbell's law is just a load of horseshit, right?  It's not like these policies led to widespread test cheating in Atlanta and Washington, DC, and several other cities.   In all seriousness, look at what happened in Washington, DC.  Student performance was used as the metric by which the district meted out both the carrot and the stick: the $160k paycheck or dismissal.  103 schools out of 200 or so were found to have statistical indicators of cheating, in some schools nearly 100% of tested classrooms were found to have wrong-to-right erasures in statistically aberrant levels.  This wasn't found out until years after these test scores were used to evaluate a whole crop of teachers. Suppose you were the teacher whose children had previously been scored by cheating teachers or administrators.  The model used to evaluate you expects that these children will see test score growth of *x* percent each year. If you don't cheat, you will get fired.  If you do cheat, you become eligible to get a shitton of money.  All that aside, the debate shouldn't even be about using student performance to evaluate teachers.  The debate shouldn't be about who gets laid off.  The debate should be about how we prevent teachers from getting laid off. "This is a common and good game-plan to learn valuable life skills and build a supplemental income. Eventually, it could become a primary income, and your strategic risk is overall relatively low. If you are diligent and patient, you are likely to succeed, but at a rate that is so slow that the primary beneficiaries of your efforts may be your children and their children. Which is good! It is a bad gameplan for building an ""empire."" Why? Because you are not the first person in your town with this idea. Probably not even the first person on the block. And among those people, some will be willing to take far more extravagant risks. Some will be better capitalized to begin with. Some will have institutional history with the market along with all the access and insider information that comes with it.  As far as we know, you have none of that. Any market condition that yields a profit for you in this space, will yield a larger one for them. In a downturn, they will be able to absorb larger losses than you. So, if your approach is to build an empire, you need to take on a considerably riskier approach, engage with the market in a more direct and time-consuming way, and be prepared to deal with the consequences if those risks play out the wrong way." That is absolute madness. The repercussions of that are, I believe, not being properly factored into your calculation.   If I'm an entry level employee, and I have lots of kids, I may receive fairly generous public dollars. If I have no kids, I won't. Is your solution to pay all entry level employees more, or just to pay people who have kids more? Neither of these is without consequence. "Educating everyone is a cultural investment, but not necessarily a good fiscal investment. (for the govt.)  200 years ago, being able to read and perform arithmetic pretty much guaranteed you an ok job, because it was a rare skillset.  The government decided that everyone being able to read and do basic maths would be a good thing, so they force us all to pay for it and they force us all to attend school. So, most of the country has a basic education. That's obviously a good thing, but it doesn't guarantee everyone in the country a good job. If 1000's of people have the same skillset and are all applying for the same job, it's impossible to differentiate job candidates. In the job market, a skill that everyone has is effectively valueless.   The same thing is happening with college. We have tons of college graduates that are all applying for the exact same jobs, and we (as a society) have produced more people to do that small group of jobs and haven't produced any people to do other jobs. Somewhat ironically immigrant workers do a lot of the work we should be doing ourselves, but we all went to college and all want to do the same ""good/high paying/etc"" jobs. And there's too many of us and not very much demand for the skills we can deliver.  So, giving secondary educations to even more people, wouldn't be a bad thing in and of itself. But it wouldn't help anyone find work." "For ""real"" investing I would usually recommend mutual funds.  But if you are trying to teach a kid about investing, I would recommend they choose individual stocks.   That will give them a great opportunity to follow the companies they bought in the news.  It also gives you an opportunity to sit down with them periodically and discuss their companies performance, economic news, etc. and how those things play into stock prices." "Unfortunately, where I live, minimum wage is what is available to High School graduates.  We have an abundance of minimum wage jobs looking to hire, and no docks, and few greater than minimum wage jobs for people right out of High School.  And minimum wage isn't enough to support a person here.  I think school costs have gone up for more than just loans for everyone.  Our colleges have administration bloat, huge wages for the top few, and are being run like businesses rather than schools: profit over people.  Their educational license still stands, but they work to increase their profit rather than increase their quality of education.  I understand that there is a large ""blame game"" going on about why people are poor or undeserving.  They are lazy. They are drug addicts and gangsters.  They are entitled.  Any excuse we can come up with to not help the other guy.  The other issue is HOW we help the other guy:  Do we hand them money and say, ""Go out and succeed""?  That's been our current method.  But both of these issues again fall to education!  If we can improve education so it teaches people how to have an impact on their world, how to find something they can do well, and how to succeed, then we can resolve the other issues.  Right now, our schools teach basic skills: Math, Science, Reading to the extent that the students can past the tests.  But the world is not built on Math, Science, and Reading.  They are important, but more important are social skills, resource allocation and utilization, self-learning, testing and verifying.  Teach them the basics!  We need them!  But teach them to be self-controlling, self-responsible people.  I know this is part of the third paragraph, but I find, on the outset, we may seem like we have completely different views, when in reality, it is simply where we put the emphasis, not the actual view itself, that differs." "idea that somehow people will take a lower income job and automatically grow into a higher paying one.  It doesn't happen automatically. But it does happen all the time. It's climbing the corporate ladder if you will.   ""leads to trying to have a workforce that's minimum wage with little room for growth""  Simply untrue at most successful companies. If you provide value, they pay you what your worth or you jump (if you are smart enough). I see it all the time.   Minimum wage may or may not have kept up with inflation, by that's like saying working at McDonald's only affords me such and such lifestyle. Defined circumstances are required to solve the problem. Inflation isn't directly solved by upping the minimum wage so move on to a better solution.   ""Jobs a worthy cry but can't be only metric to ensure people have opportunity to live decently"".   Jobs are the opportunity. Where there is specific abuse in the workplace denying people equal job opportunity, we fight it. If you don't pay me enough, and I am forced to work for you... that's called indentured servitude which is an abuse and illegal as humans are property in such a case. But if you force me to pay you more than I want to, somehow that's okay? Goes both ways. Leave to a company that pays you what your worth if I don't pay you enough. This is how the most people grow over time to better salaries and more prestigious titles.  ""Lots of college grads with low paying jobs""  Define ""low paying"". I'm a college grad. Wife is too. Lots of people I know are. What $ we make varies greatly from person to person based largely upon the opportunities we created/took not because of a mandated min wage." The value of money is not only in the earning and saving of it but also in the discipline in spending it.  Any approach to teaching children about money must ensure a balance between the two otherwise they will either become fearful of spending (and so never actually learn that money is but a tool and can be enjoyed) or irresponsible (spending with abandon with all that concomitant misery): Teaching kids about money is a wonderful opportunity to instil discipline and values.  Any strategy must be structured to suite the child's age and abilities as well.  Trying to teach compound interest to too young a child will just become needlessly confusing and worrying for them.  Hope this gives a few ideas. "Nobel laureate economist, Paul Krugman, wrote a piece many moons ago about economic expansion and money supply.  As an illustration of how money supply affects the economy, he used the example of a baby-sitting co-op.  While simplistic, it provides an easy to grasp notion of how printing money and restricting it (e.g. by pegging the currency to gold reserves) can affect the economy. Here is an excerpt from his webpage ( http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howfast.html ): ""With the decline of the traditional extended family, in which relatives were available to take care of children at need, many parents in the United States have sought alternative arrangements. A popular scheme is the baby-sitting coop, in which a group of parents agree to help each other out on a reciprocal basis, with each parent serving both as baby-sitter and baby-sittee. Any such coop requires rules that ensure that all members do their fair share. One natural answer, at least to people accustomed to a market economy, is to use some kind of token or marker system: parents ""earn"" tokens by babysitting, then in turn hand over these tokens when their own children are minded by others. For example, a recently formed coop in Western Massachusetts uses Popsicle sticks, each representing one hour of babysitting. When a new parent enters the coop, he or she receives an initial allocation of ten sticks.  This system is self-regulating, in the sense that it automatically ensures that over any length of time a parent will put in more or less the same amount of time that he or she receives. It turns out, however, that establishing such a token system is not enough to make a coop work properly. It is also necessary to get the number of tokens per member more or less right. To see why, suppose that there were very few tokens in circulation. Parents will want on average to hold some reserve of tokens - enough to deal with the possibility that they may want to go out a few times before they have a chance to babysit themselves and earn more tokens. Any individual parent can, of course, try to accumulate more tokens by babysitting more and going out less. But what happens if almost everyone is trying to accumulate tokens - as they will be if there are very few in circulation? One parent's decision to go out is another's opportunity to babysit. So if everyone in the coop is trying to add to his or her reserve of tokens, there will be very few opportunities to babysit. This in turn will make people even more reluctant to go out, and use up their precious token reserves; and the level of activity in the coop may decline to a disappointingly low level.  The solution to this problem is, of course, simply to issue more Popsicle sticks. But not too many - because an excess of popsicle sticks can pose an equally severe problem. Suppose that almost everyone in the coop has more sticks than they need; then they will be eager to go out, but reluctant to babysit. It will therefore become hard to find babysitters - and since opportunities to use popsicle sticks will become rare, people will become even less willing to spend time and effort earning them. Too many tokens in circulation, then, can be just as destructive as too few."" -- Paul Krugman, 1997 (accessed webpage 2010)." "Although my kid just turned 5, he's learning the value of money now, which should help him in the future. First thing, teach him that you exchange money for goods and services. Let him see the bills, and explain what they're for (i.e. ""I pay ISP Co to give us Internet; that lets us watch Youtube and Netflix, as well as play games with Grandma on your GameStation""). After a little while, they will see where it goes, and why. Then you have your automatic bills, such as mortgage payments. I make a habit of taking out the cash after I get paid, and my son comes with me to the bank where I deposit it again (I get paid monthly, so it's only one extra withdraw). He can physically see the money, and understand that if the stack is gone, it's gone. Now that he is understanding things cost money, he wants to make money himself. He volunteers to help clean up the kitchen and vacuum rooms in the house, usually without being asked. I give him a dollar or two for the simple chores like that. Things like cleaning his room or his own mess, he does not get paid for. He puts all his money into his piggy bank, and he has some goals in mind: a big fire truck, a police helicopter, a pool, a monster truck, a boat. Remember he's only 5. He has his goals, and we have the money he's been saving up. We calculate how many times he needs to vacuum the living room, or clean up dishes, to get there, and he realizes it takes a long time. He looks for other ways to make money around the house, and we come up with solutions together. I am hoping in a year or two that I can show him my investments and get him to understand why they make or lose money. I want to get him in to the habit of investing a little bit every few months, then every month, to help his income grow, even if he can't touch the money quite yet." "Accounting for this properly is not a trivial matter, and you would be wise to pay a little extra to talk with a lawyer and/or CPA to ensure the precise wording. How best to structure such an arrangement will depend upon your particular jurisdiction, as this is not a federal matter - you need someone licensed to advise in your particular state at least. The law of real estate co-ownership (as defined on a deed) is not sufficient for the task you are asking of it - you need something more sophisticated. Family Partnership (we'll call it FP) is created (LLC, LLP, whatever). We'll say April + A-Husband gets 50%, and Sister gets 50% equity (how you should handle ownership with your husband is outside the scope of this answer, but you should probably talk it over with a lawyer and this will depend on your state!).  A loan is taken out to buy the property, in this case with all partners personally guaranteeing the loan equally, but the loan is really being taken out by FP. The mortgage should probably show 100% ownership by FP, not by any of you individually - you will only be guaranteeing the loan, and your ownership is purely through the partnership. You and your husband put $20,000 into the partnership. The FP now lists a $20,000 liability to you, and a $20,000 asset in cash. FP buys the $320,000 house (increase assets) with a $300,000 mortgage (liability) and $20,000 cash (decrease assets). Equity in the partnership is $0 right now. The ownership at present is clear. You own 50% of $0, and your sister owns 50% of $0. Where'd your money go?! Simple - it's a liability of the partnership, so you and your husband are together owed $20,000 by the partnership before any equity exists. Everything balances nicely at this point. Note that you should account for paying closing costs the same as you considered the down payment - that money should be paid back to you before any is doled out as investment profit! Now, how do you handle mortgage payments? This actually isn't as hard as it sounds, thanks to the nature of a partnership and proper business accounting. With a good foundation the rest of the building proceeds quite cleanly. On month 1 your sister pays $1400 into the partnership, while you pay $645 into the partnership. FP will record an increase in assets (cash) of $1800, an increase in liability to your sister of $1400, and an increase in liability to you of $645. FP will then record a decrease in cash assets of $1800 to pay the mortgage, with a matching increase in cost account for the mortgage. No net change in equity, but your individual contributions are still preserved. Let's say that now after only 1 month you decide to sell the property - someone makes an offer you just can't refuse of $350,000 dollars (we'll pretend all the closing costs disappeared in buying and selling, but it should be clear how to account for those as I mention earlier). Now what happens? FP gets an increase in cash assets of $350,000, decreases the house asset ($320,000 - original purchase price), and pays off the mortgage - for simplicity let's pretend it's still $300,000 somehow. Now there's $50,000 in cash left in the partnership - who's money is it? By accounting for the house this way, the answer is easily determined. First all investments are paid back - so you get back $20,000 for the down payment, $645 for your mortgage payments so far, and your sister gets back $1400 for her mortgage payment. There is now $27,995 left, and by being equal partners you get to split it - 13,977 to you and your husband and the same amount to your sister (I'm keeping the extra dollar for my advice to talk to a lawyer/CPA). What About Getting To Live There? The fact is that your sister is getting a little something extra out of the deal - she get's the live there! How do you account for that? Well, you might just be calling it a gift. The problem is you aren't in any way, shape, or form putting that in writing, assigning it a value, nothing.  Also, what do you do if you want to sell/cash out or at least get rid of the mortgage, as it will be showing up as a debt on your credit report and will effect your ability to secure financing of your own in the future if you decide to buy a house for your husband and yourself?  Now this is the kind of stuff where families get in trouble. You are mixing personal lives and business arrangements, and some things are not written down (like the right to occupy the property) and this can really get messy. Would evicting your sister to sell the house before you all go bankrupt on a bad deal make future family gatherings tense? I'm betting it might. There should be a carefully worded lease probably from the partnership to your sister. That would help protect you from extra court costs in trying to determine who has the rights to occupy the property, especially if it's also written up as part of the partnership agreement...but now you are building the potential for eviction proceedings against your sister right into an investment deal? Ugh, what a potential nightmare! And done right, there should probably be some dollar value assigned to the right to live there and use the property. Unless you just want to really gift that to your sister, but this can be a kind of invisible and poorly quantified gift - and those don't usually work very well psychologically. And it also means she's going to be getting an awfully larger benefit from this ""investment"" than you and your husband - do you think that might cause animosity over dozens and dozens of writing out the check to pay for the property while not realizing any direct benefit while you pay to keep up your own living circumstances too? In short, you need a legal structure that can properly account for the fact that you are starting out in-equal contributors to your scheme, and ongoing contributions will be different over time too. What if she falls on hard times and you make a few of the mortgage payments? What if she wants to redo the bathroom and insists on paying for the whole thing herself or with her own loan, etc? With a properly documented partnership - or equivalent such business entity - these questions are easily resolved. They can be equitably handled by a court in event of family squabble, divorce, death, bankruptcy, emergency liquidation, early sale, refinance - you name it. No percentage of simple co-ownership recorded on a deed can do any of this for you. No math can provide you the proper protection that a properly organized business entity can. I would thus strongly advise you, your husband, and your sister to spend the comparatively tiny amount of extra money to get advice from a real estate/investment lawyer/CPA to get you set up right. Keep all receipts and you can pay a book keeper or the accountant to do end of the year taxes, and answer questions that will come up like how to properly account for things like depreciation on taxes. Your intuition that you should make sure things are formally written up in times when everyone is on good terms is extremely wise, so please follow it up with in-person paid consultation from an expert. And no matter what, this deal as presently structured has a really large built-in potential for heartache as you have three partners AND one of the partners is also renting the property partially from themselves while putting no money down?  This has a great potential to be a train wreck, so please do look into what would happen if these went wrong into some more detail and write up in advance - in a legally binding way - what all parties rights and responsibilities are."