 TITLE: How to Teach Your Child to Budget Money CONTENT: Teaching Middle School Children How to Budget\n---------------------------------------------\nBy middle school, kids have the math skills and conceptual thinking to do some rudimentary budgeting. They're also ready to learn some of the realities of money management—from you, the in-house money manager. Bring your kids into your financial world. While you don't want to burden them with money stress or overwhelm them with too much information, no one is going to talk to them openly about how to earn a living and make ends meet like you will.\n*   **Share your costs.** Explain how much it costs to maintain your home—rent or mortgage, insurance, utilities and maintenance. Tell them how much you spend on groceries each week. How much did your car cost? How do you pay for it?\n*   **Talk about credit.** Credit is an abstract concept, but it can dictate whether or not you buy a home or finance a car. What is credit? How does it work? What do you do to maintain good credit and how does that help you?\n*   **Show them how to use a spreadsheet.** Most middle schoolers don't have enough capital to warrant a budget of their own, but they can use spreadsheets to understand how budgets work. Ask them to list out how much owning a dog would cost. Or how much they would need every month to pay for a new car with a five-year loan.\n*   **Consider a parent-managed debit card.** Part of budgeting is learning how to control spending on a card account. What if you could give your kid a card with training wheels? Parent-managed debit cards like Greenlight function like bank debit cards, but they come with an app that allows parents to view and control spending—or receive alerts when transactions are made. Spending is limited to what's loaded onto the card, keeping risk low. END