Teaching those Teens–Do As I Say, Not As I Do!

This is a guest post by Sue from HomeSchoolThroughHighSchool.com:

Teach Your Teens Real Life Money Skills

(by Sue a@ www.homeschoolthroughhighschool.com)

Do you agree that we as a country are in big financial trouble? Do you think it would be difficult to find an American adult who would disagree?

At every level, from families to local governments to the national government, we don’t live within our means; we overspend. The mindset of  “buy now, pay later” permeates our culture. We are up to our eyeballs in debt! As Dave Ramsey succinctly puts it:

“We want it all and we can borrow to get it all before we can afford it all.”

Consider these alarming statistics about students who graduate from high school:

• They lack basic skills in the management of personal financial affairs (1)
• Many are unable to balance a checkbook (1)
• Most simply have no insight into the basic survival principles involved with earning, spending, saving and investing. (1)
• Of the 6,000 students who took the Jump$tart personal finance survey in 2006, 62% received failing scores with 60% being the lowest passing grade. (2)
• A study of 1,065 teens found that 21% of 18 and 19-year-olds have credit cards. (2)
• Nearly 1/3 of high school seniors already use a credit card (2)
• By the time they reach their senior year, 56 percent of students carry four or more credit cards, with an average balance of $2,864. (2)
• People in the 18 to 24 age bracket spend nearly 30% of their monthly income just on debt (2)
• More than 1/3 of highschoolers have an ATM card (2)
• Only 1 in 3 teens knows how to read a bank statement, balance a checkbook and pay bills.  Barely 1 in 5 have an idea how to invest (2)
• Fewer than 30 percent of young Americans are given the opportunity to take as little as one week’s worth of course-work in money management or personal finance in high school. (2)

Dave Ramsey, in his book Financial Peace Revisited states on page 18:

“It is almost impossible to get out of high school today without knowing what an amoeba is – now there’s a really valuable piece of information – but few high school seniors can keep a checkbook balanced.”

American youth are financially illiterate! It is imperative that we teach our kids, especially our highschoolers about money with real hands on learning and as homeschoolers, we have the perfect environment to do this. Teach them while they are still home. Let them make and learn from their decisions and mistakes now while they still have the safety net of home to keep them from getting into serious financial trouble.

And… may I be so bold to say that many American parents are also financially illiterate. We as parents need to not only learn about financial responsibility, but live it, as well. We may be teaching kids about money, but are our actions (which speak louder than words) teaching them something different? Are we modeling good stewardship with our finances or are we modeling “do as I say, not as I do?”

Visit Sue at http://www.homeschoolthroughhighschool.com/life-lessons/teach-your-teens-real-life-money-skills

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