Money and Finance Lessons for Homeschooling

Learning about how to get and use money is something that you should start doing as early as possible, long before you have a job. If you learn about managing money, a skill called financial literacy, it will be much easier for you to be happy and successful when you’re grown up and have to pay for everything you need and want yourself. Like with anything else you might learn about at school, learning to manage money takes patience and practice. You can learn financial skills by reading about this subject, but you can also learn in a lot of other ways, like playing money-related games or watching what adults do with their money.

The world of finance can be complicated, even for a lot of adults, so even grown-ups sometimes make really serious mistakes. But when you have a firm grasp of the basics of money management, you’ll be able to avoid some of these mistakes. And even when something bad happens that you couldn’t prevent, you’ll have the skills to lessen the bad effects of the situation. When you’re smart about managing your money, one mistake or unexpected cost doesn’t have to ruin your life.

Adults who know a lot about how to manage money can even turn their money into more money. Saving and investing are ways that people can make their money grow, so they’ll have more money for retirement or to spend on their families. Investing can be risky, but if you’re careful, it can help to make your finances even stronger.

You may not have to learn about the stock market or global economics right now, but you can get a good start on your financial literacy by learning the basic skills you’ll need to get by. Even as a kid, you might get money sometimes, whether it’s for your birthday, from the tooth fairy, or as an allowance, and you’ll need to know what to do with it. That starts by learning how much different coins and bills are worth and how to add these amounts together to figure out how much money you have. You also need to be able to compare amounts to figure out whether you can afford something: If you have $9.50 saved up and you want to buy something that costs $9.15, do you have enough? Once you’ve mastered those skills, you can work on things like comparing two products to figure out which is a better deal. For instance, maybe you could buy that thing you wanted for $9.15, but if you looked around a little, you might find that a different store is selling it for $8.50.

When you’re an adult, you’ll also need to learn to prioritize your spending. This means that you have to figure out which things are wants and which things are needs, then make sure that you can afford all of your needs before you spend money on wants. You can’t spend all of your money on video games when you don’t have any food in the house: You’ll need to buy groceries first, then see how much money is left to buy games.

There are lots of great games and activities on the Internet that can help you learn financial skills, from counting money to managing your credit score. But you can also learn about managing money with something as simple as watching your parents at the grocery store. How do they figure out which products to buy? And how do they know that they have enough money? Ask questions while you’re shopping to learn about how adults make spending decisions. If you put in the effort to learn about money now, you can avoid expensive mistakes and have more money left over for fun stuff in the future.