Grandma Rie’s 2018 Money Camp

Teaching the next generation to successfully handle money and personal finances is normally a family responsibility. Although parents bear much of the burden to teach, train and model good personal finance, extended family members can also contribute.

Although my grown children do very well in the personal finance arena, they learned from us by osmosis, without any special or formal training by my spouse or I. When they presented me with grandchildren, I vowed that I would take an active part in teaching financial literacy to them.

As a result, I started a one week ‘Grandma Rie’s Money Camp’ in 2011 and held our 8th annual one this year.

Background.

This year Money Camp was again held for my two grandchildren at our lake condo. The oldest boy is now 14 and our granddaughter is almost 11.

This year

My Grandson was about to embark on his freshman year in high school and I had a very strong feeling this might be the last year he would be interested in coming to Grandma’s Money Camp.

In addition, it was a short week due to the High School Orientation session held during the week I had scheduled for camp.

Due to these facts, I focused on trying to cover many things I wanted to share with him as he prepared to step out into the world – through high school, college and young adulthood. As a consequence of some of the subject matter, there were times when the 10 year old grew very bored.

We started camp with a discussion of what I hope for them in life, these included things such as health, happiness, success, self sufficiency, college educations & good career choices, wise use of any financial windfalls they might receive, attainment of financial freedom, enjoyment of and gratefulness for their life and their enrichment of those around them somehow.

I brought in more grown up financial concepts such as the global economy, and did a full day review of the major concepts we had covered in prior years, using my “4 Steps to Financial Freedom poster”. This review included risks, insurance, debt, credit, credit ratings, inflation, taxes, tracking what you own and owe and understanding how a career or job choice and your finances and the way you will need to live.

My 4 steps to Financial Freedom are:

Step 1 Wanting it – setting a goal to be financially free

Step 2 Earning

Step 3 Saving

Step 4 Investing

 

I also incorporated a visual poster listing my 7 Guiding Rules for Your Finances and covered it.

These are:

1. Have a goal

• financial freedom is a good goal
• be self-sufficient

2. Earn more than you spend

• carefully consider career choices
• distinguish between wants and needs
• postpone expenses for ‘wants’
• understand ‘add on’ costs

3. Pay yourself first

• save
• build an emergency fund
• invest to build passive income

4. Protect yourself and your money

• Understand risks you take
• Prepare for the unexpected

5. Use debt wisely

• keep your credit score high
  • pay off credit cards each month
  • pay bills on time
• read all legal contracts (including fine print)
• get the best possible terms on loans
  • seek low interest and fees
  • look for credit card rewards
• acquire debt for real assets, not for things that lose value

6. Use money as a tool, not an end

• enjoy life (money helps)
• find joy in giving

7. Know what you own and owe

• keep a budget to track income and expenses
• keep a record of your net worth
• know & protect what ‘s in your wallet

We did a full day on protecting yourself, your stuff and your identity using personal examples, movie clips and discussions. This included a hefty section and movie clip on teen driving safety as my 14 year old would soon get his learners permit to drive!

I led a day and half long session on Planning for Your Financial Future.

In it, we covered how educational opportunities can affect your finances – including details like differences between grade school and middle school (for the 10 year old) and between middle school and high school – activities in high school that can help get you where you want to be later in life, as well as summer jobs and how to get and keep them.

We worked our way into talking about post high school education and how it was important to their future financial life. In that part we explored the various options, such as trade school, community college, and 4 year colleges.

Finally we got down to some nitty gritty advice on first big purchases of either a car or a cell phone.

Of course, we also had our yearly compound interest exercise. We start with a dollar in a see through jar and each morning, they compute how much interest the money in the jar earns at whatever interest rate we are using that year. In past years, Grandma has paid exorbitant amounts of interest just so they can see the results of compounding within the Money Camp week. This year, we repeated the two jars from last year, one paid 30% interest and one paid 4% interest.