Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Teach Your Child About Finances With This Book

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As a mom and personal finance blogger, I get the opportunity to review many books.  One that I just reviewed that I can’t recommend highly enough is Sunny Lee’s book, Is Your Child a Money Master or a Money Monster?

Money Master or Money Monster?

Sunny Lee is a financial advisor, and she has taken the time to teach her twin sons about money.  In fact, her strategy has worked so well that she’s sharing all her techniques in this book.

Lee has a variety of strategies for teaching kids about money in a fun, incentive-filled way.

Offer rewards.  Lee’s strategy of offering her children rewards helps shape their behavior in a positive direction.  For instance, when her sons were in 1st grade, Lee developed the Morning Stuff Allowance Project.  Each morning, her kids had to get up when their alarms went off, tidy their rooms, get dressed, pack their backpacks, and make and eat their own breakfast and get to school on time.  If they did this every day, they earned $3 a week.

While the kids were motivated by the money, they were also unknowingly developing skills that would help them through the rest of their lives.  Even better, Lee didn’t have to fight with her boys in the morning to get up and get their chores done.  Everyone in her household could enjoy a more peaceful morning.

Play games.  As the boys got older, part of Lee’s strategy to teach them about money was to give them a safe place to experiment.  She did this by finding a variety of free, money based games online.  Her boys experimented online with running a coffee shop.  They had to decide when to discount their coffee based on the season, how much inventory to buy, etc.

Try out your skills in the real world.  Finally, Lee let her sons experiment and try their money skills in the real world.  An important component of this was to let them fail in small ways.  One son spent a large sum of money on a hat, which he loved, but then he didn’t have money available for a while after that.  Her other son learned from his brother and bought a hat at a discounted market so he wouldn’t use all of his money on one item.

Lee’s book contains seven strategies to teach your kids about money (and as a byproduct, teach them personal responsibility).  One thing I loved about the book and her strategy is that she keeps adding layers to her plan.  For instance, after her kids mastered the Morning Stuff Allowance Project, that remained in place, but Lee added on the Special Incentive Project.  If her boys chose to, they could earn additional money throughout the week by completing a book report, doing an art project, etc.  Again, she helped her children grow academically and artistically through an incentive.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to not only give their children a strong financial footing, but also a strong work ethic.

Have you read this book?  What is your favorite book to teach kids about money?

The New Retirement

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I recently had the chance to chat with Todd Tresidder.  If you don’t know the name, don’t worry.  Up until about a year ago, I didn’t either.  But, the short of it is that the guy is retired.  In fact, he retired much earlier than most will.  At the ripe “old” age of 35, he retired.  Which must mean he’s off golfing around in the Arizona heat, right?  Or down, sipping OJ at some southern Florida retirement village?  Not likely.

Todd is retired in the sense that he doesn’t report to a boss.  He does what he wants, when he wants to.  One of the things that he wants to do is write books that help people like you and I become better financially.  He’s got several that he’s written so far, and I’m sure he’s working on more.  During that first meeting, Todd and I spoke for a while on retirement.  Speaking with another financially minded person, I usually expect to hear people talk about 401(k)s, IRAs, and stock purchasing.  I don’t discount those tools, but I just don’t feel that, like Social Security, you should be depending on them for your whole retirement.  Surprisingly, Todd agrees.  The longer we spoke, the more we found that we agreed on.  At the end of our conversations, Todd offered me a copy of his book on retirement. I accepted.

How Much Money do I need to retireLong story short, I finally read it.  It took me a while, but I’m glad I got around to it.

If there’s anything that stands out about the book, is that Todd knows what he’s talking about.  He’s got the experience behind him to talk about the subject in an informed and educational manner, and technically, probably knows more about some of his subject matter than I ever will.  He spends the first several chapters of the book dispelling a few myths about retirement, and about the way in which most people tend to think about it.  He then takes off on a few chapters of some of the math and logic behind the different ways of calculating your retirement needs, and calculating that mythical “number” that everyone seems to be seeking out that will indicate that they’ve saved all that they need to save for retirement.  Not only does that one perfect number not exist, he argues, but the calculations that we make to arrive at it are completely flawed.

The rest of the book is focused on what I like to call the New Retirement.  He goes into detail on the ways to properly estimate your income needs for the future, and then into ways that he believes (and I agree) that a properly diversified retirement “portfolio” should be structured.  I don’t want to spoil too much of the book so I won’t say much more.  What I will say is that the book isn’t terribly long.  It’s not a deeply structured manual on all the different retirement accounts.  And it’s not terribly expensive.  It’s $4.99 on the Kindle (free for Prime members), and about $10 in paperback.

Pick up a copy of How Much Money do I need to Retire at Amazon.  You can check out Todd’s site as well as the other books he’s written at FinancialMentor.com.

 

Your Money or Your Life

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Your Money or Your Life

By: Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

When this book first came onto my radar as a book I might like to read, it was with reviews from my fellow personal finance bloggers that described it as one that will change your life, and that will make your finances follow you rather than the other way around.  Both of those descriptions are pretty accurate.

For someone like myself, who’s been writing on personal finance for over 5 years (Beating Broke turns 4 next month!), I’ve seen just about every bit of advice and every bit of financial knowledge that there is out there.  Or, at least I think I have.  Then something like this book comes along and puts it all together in a different way, or expresses it in a slightly different way, and I learn something new.

So, here’s the short review.  If you find yourself struggling with your money, and with how your money and your life can meet, this is most certainly a book for you.  It’s not your typical personal finance book that’s going to tell you how to balance your checkbook, what to spend on (and what not to), or anything of the sort.  What it is going to do is give you the tools to tracking what you’re spending your money on and then coming to terms with whether those spending habits are habits that are putting you on a track towards a much more fulfilled life.  They go a bit further than that, and get into how you can take your reformed spending habits, track them, and then turn your life into something that you want it to be, that uses money as a tool to further your life-long goals rather than postpone them.

It’s not just a book for those that are struggling with money, either.  I found several small things that I’ll be working on implementing over the next few months that I hope will bring my finances into further alignment with goals and ambitions that have little to do with work, or money.

Have you read it?  What was your reaction?  Did you follow it’s steps, and how did they help (or not) you?