Let Your Kids Get Into Debt
There are many reasons for paying child benefits. By allowing children to make and manage small amounts of money, they learn to budget, spend, save, and give.
In addition, if you live in a home where benefits are tied to household chores – or a home where benefits are free but you can earn extra money by completing certain tasks – your children will learn well what it means to receive fair financial compensation for work. Done.
However, you should also teach your children what it means to get into debt.
On Medium, Julie Morris explains why she decided to let her 8-year-old daughter go into debt in order to buy a pair of shoes :
Until now, I have not let them “borrow”. How will this affect the eldest daughter? Will she feel the weight of debt with those shiny new sneakers that she couldn’t afford yesterday? Will that diminish the joy of wearing them in church tonight? Maybe.
I hope this sucks a little of the joy out of her weekend.
While the idea of ​​deliberately sucking the joy out of your child’s weekend may sound harsh, there is a more important lesson here. Demanding his daughter to spend the weekend hassle-free to pay off the debt, Morris teaches her 8-year-old what it means to do work in exchange for money that has already been spent.
Or, as Morris put it:
I hope she hates making money that she will never see. I hope she regrets her shoe purchase because today she does every second of the housework!
You know your children better than I do – there are probably children who would not mind working off a debt, and this is a rare child who at some point did not try to negotiate an advance on his allowance.
As your kids get older, they’ll start paying attention to how you use your debt, whether you shop with a credit card or pay for your car monthly, and may correctly determine that some debts are more valuable than others. Whether you like it or not, many of us use debt to improve our lives – it’s when those debts become insurmountable that we get into trouble.
But teaching an 8-year-old that extra money today means extra hassle tomorrow is still a good lesson.
Does it take away the fun of the weekend, or do they look at their shiny new shoes and decide it was worth it.