The question often gets asked about how to teach children how to manage their money or to be frugal. Sometimes lessons on frugality can be harsh ones teaching children to resent the concept rather than embrace it, so it can be a useful to find ways to teach your children the benefits of being frugal that are fun, interesting and sure to leave a lasting impression on your child.

Saving Money

Perhaps the most important part of being frugal is learning to save money and no child is too young to understand this concept. Finding fun and creative ways to make saving fun for your child is easy from setting goals to helping them achieve a certain goal. A fun way to teach them to save is to take a jar label it with their goal, and challenge them to fill the jar in a certain amount of time. You can set a reward like offering to match the amount of money in the jar, or something smaller like a special family night they plan.



The Grocery Game

Children often do not understand that parent's funds are limited and when you head to the store it can be a struggle to help them to understand you have a budget to keep. Have your child make up a menu and grocery list with a set budget. Give them coupons to clip and flyers to look for and challenge them to make up a grocery list that comes under the budget you set. Tell them that if they do a good enough job that the two of you will use it to go shopping this week.


Where can we Go for Free

Have your child make up a story about a free day where the only entertainment all day is free. Encourage him to find ideas that he can incorporate into his story by looking at the newspaper, magazines and the Internet. Once he has completed his fantasy free day than share the day with him for real.


Help your Child to Achieve Short Term Goals

Children have wants and desires just like adults do, and teaching your child to save towards these wants is an important lesson for them to learn and yet $50 or any other large sum of money can seem like a fortune and totally unreachable to them. Encourage them to save for their wants but offering to match every dollar they save towards their goal, this will make the goal seem much more realistic, and teach them volumes about the benefits of saving money.



Find the Best Deal



Take your child to the store and play this little game as you shop for anything from clothes to food. Teach them about unit prices, and how to break down the cost of anything to figure out what is the best deal. Then take them thru the store have them find the best deals for everything you buy.

Make Frugality and saving fun and your child will grow up understand the reason behind being frugal, and with luck they will embrace these concepts as an adult and move on to their own lives.

Thrifty Hearts provides practical solutions for Frugal Families, Patty Getz has been helping families get more for their money since 2000. For more money saving tips and advice visit our website, or stop by our Blog!


5 Lessons in Frugality You Children Will Enjoy By Patty Getz
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FamilyIgloo Vision : Empowering families through knowledge and networking

FamilyIgloo was developed to serve as an informative, safe, fun and synergistic social family network site. With today’s ever increasing hectic lifestyles, getting informed about family related news and connecting with likeminded peers is often a difficult task to accomplish. Time and again couples with young children have limited occasion to socialize outside the family unit, which becomes one of our primary goals.
We hope that this site will allow families to get informed about some of the latest family related web articles, enforce long distance ties, get to know their neighborhood, find families with similar outdoor/indoor hobbies, and share photos, videos, and precious moments with selected members. We also hope that families will get to meet each other in a SECURE environment such as family excursions, park barbecues, dining out, birthday parties, hiking out, moms’ night out, fathers’ night out and toys exchange and resale.

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-Forming online social groups for the neighborhood watch programs and local churches

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