By Nick Royer, IARFC Board Member
April is designated as Financial Literacy Month. The best place to start is right in your own home, your own family. Teaching your kids from the beginning the value of using money wisely is a responsibility as a parent and responsible citizen. 
When I grew up, my parents taught me to SAVE. That’s a word rarely used these days as it seems the word SAVE has been replaced by the word SPEND. Spend even if you don’t have it to spend. The philosophy has changed and unfortunately the future generations will have less saved for retirement and not be able to enjoy a confident retirement lifestyle like their parents or grandparents before them. I’ve been a retirement income planner for 13 years now and when we meet with people we help them properly invest their retirement NEST EGG for both a dependable retirement income and growth to help out with future costs or inflation…but you first have to have a NEST EGG. People are saving less, spending more, and let’s be honest it does cost more to live now. Look at the cost of college or gas! If you want to provide for your family like your parents did for you it is going to cost dramatically more. All of this takes money out of your pocket now. But more importantly takes it out of your future pocket.
I’ve already started an envelope system with my 6 year old Bradley to teach him the value of money. He has a chore list and can earn money by doing his chores. Once he has that money my wife and I help him put equal amount in each of three envelopes. The three envelopes are Spend, Save, and Give. It’s always awesome when we go to church on Sunday and Bradley carries in his Give envelope and pulls out a few bucks to put in the collections basket. This past Sunday he noticed he didn’t have much money left in his give envelope so he told me, “I better work to get more money in here”. That’s the ticket, and it made me a proud dad to hear that.
This is something simple that you can do today to teach your kids how to be a better steward of their money later!
