Personal finance education in schools is finally getting some attention, but the best financial education starts at home. On today’s special prelude-to-summer-vacation roundtable discussion, we’re joined by three experts in the field of kids and money. Joining us today are John Lanza from The Art of Allowance podcast, the founder of the Wealthy Kids Investment Club Maya Cobic, and money educator Rob Phelan.
In the second half of the show, sponsored by DepositAccounts.com, we talk about how to teach kids about money in the digital world.
And you won’t want to miss Doug’s toothy finance-related trivia question!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.StackingBenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Topic: Kids & Money
How to raise financially savvy kids
During our conversation you’ll hear us mention:
- The role of parents in early childhood financial education.
- The endless opportunities to teach kids about money.
- How to use allowance as a learning opportunity.
- Letting kids make mistakes and using that experience to open up a conversation.
- How to engage with your kids in an age appropriate way.
- Funding college education – from 529 plans to loans.
- How to answer the question, “How much do you make?”
- Games to play with your kids.
Our Contributors
A big thanks to our contributors! You can check out more links for our guests below.
John Lanza
Another thanks to John Lanza for joining our contributors this week! Hear more from John on his show, The Art of Allowance at The Art of Allowance Podcast.
Check out his hit book The Art of Allowance: A Short, Practical Guide to Raising Money-Smart, Money-Empowered Kids.
Maya Cobic
Another thanks to Maya Corbic for joining our contributors this week!
Learn more about and enroll in The Wealthy Kids Investment Club.
Check out her hit book From Piggy Banks to Stocks: The Ultimate Guide for a Young Investor .
Rob Phelan
Another thanks to Rob Phelan for joining our contributors this week!
Learn more about FI Educator.
Check out his hit book M is for Money.
Doug’s Game Show Trivia
- According to Delta Dental, how much is the average tooth fairy payout for one tooth?
DepositAccounts
Thanks to DepositAccounts.com for sponsoring Stacking Benjamins. DepositsAccounts.com is the #1 place to go when you’re looking to see if your rate is the BEST rate on savings, CDs, money markets, and even checking accounts! Check out ALL of the rates ranked from best to worst (and see the national averages) at DepositAccounts.com.
Join Us on Monday!
Tune in on Monday when you’ll learn how to negotiate everything – from nicer hotel rooms to better rates on loans – with speaker and author of “Ask Questions, Save Money, Make More,” Matt Schulz.
Miss our last show? Check it out here: When Does It Pay To Be More Scientific About Your Retirement Approach?
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Episode transcript
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement, it’s The Stacking Benjamin Show! I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug and today with summer vacation looming in the shadows like the dark specter of childcare that it is,
we’re discussing all things kids and money with three experts on the subject. First we have from the golden age of Hollywood and with a beautiful tenor voice,
the host of the Art of Allowance podcast, it’s Mario Lanza. Unbelievable! Plus, high school finance teacher and the fire community’s top kids and money educator,
Rob Thielen. And finally, founder of the Wealthy Kids Investment Club, I gotta get to know those kids, it’s Maya Korbic. But that’s not all. Halfway through the show,
I’ll share my toothy trivia question. And now, a guy who sprinkles a little magic into every episode, why do they make me say this stuff? It’s Joe Salcihi.
Oh, that might be Lisa’s best one yet, Doug. Not a fan. Happy Friday, everyone. Welcome to the show. I am Joe Salcihi, average show money on Twitter or X or wherever you are. And super happy you’re here with us.
Today’s roundtable discussion is brought to you by State Farm. State Farm knows your business is your life. State Farm agents are small business owners too, so they know what it takes. They can help you create a personalized insurance plan that fits your small business needs and budget.
Small business insurance from State Farm, like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. Talk to your local agent today. And Doug, summer vacation. Uh, I love it, Doug, when at the team meeting,
you ask when summer vacation starts for our staff every year. There’s one comment, isn’t there? No, unfortunately. we work all the way through the summer. I apologize for that, but that’s, yes, that ended after high school.
Let’s say hello to these wonderful people who are gonna help us today. First of all, you said Mario, but it’s his better known brother, John Lanza, who’s here with us today. How are you, John?
- I’m very good. I will spare you my opera rendition, but I wish I had Mario’s voice, but I don’t. – Well, for people who… who will forget about Mario for a second,
let’s go with this character, John. Tell us about the Art of Allowance podcast because you’ve got a great podcast talking about some of the topics we’re talking about today. Thanks. I love to interview parents.
I love to interview money experts and often both. Joe, you’ve been on the podcast and we had a lot of fun. Really, the whole idea is to just grab ideas that parents can then kind of grab onto.
to for their different systems, you know, and everybody’s got great ideas. You had some really cool ideas like your circle back technique, maybe we’ll even talk about that later today. But the whole idea is to provide parents with the opportunity to have little tips and techniques that they can use to help them raise money smart kids.
And it’s available wherever finer podcasts are available. That is true. And she is the woman behind the hit book from piggy banks. banks to stocks. Maya Corbic is here. Maya,
how are you? I’m well. Thank you so much for having me on the show. You and I met at FinCon. I was so happy that I got to meet you there. Tell everybody about the work you do. I’m a CPA and I’ve been helping parents teach kids about money for the past 12 years.
I wrote the book from piggy banks to stocks, The Ultimate Guide for Young Investor. It’s actually a book that I wish I had when I was a kid. It’s written in a language that a 10 -year -old can understand. My goal is to help parents obviously teach kids about money.
But one big question that I often get is how to teach them about investing. So lately I’ve been focusing a lot on that because a lot of us know that we have to invest, but we don’t know how or where to start or how to teach our kids.
So that’s kind of how the book came about as well as my wealthy kids investment club. Well, I can’t wait to talk about kids and investing as part of our curriculum summer summer curriculum here today. And I’m super glad you’re with us.
And rounding out our panel, this guy not only is interested in kids and money, he’s created an entire curriculum for kids and money, you know, in a spare time when he’s not teaching. And when he’s not writing his book,
Emma’s for Money, Rob Villens here. How are you, man? Hey guys, I’m doing really well. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I’m super… You missed your breakaway there on curriculum. I was waiting for you to jump on it. And then you said it a second time, like what? “You’re getting slow,
Joe. Come on.” I know. So tell everybody about your work, Rob, because you’re a busy man. I try not to be. That’s the goal, is to not be busy, but yeah,
it always seems to end up being that way. So I am a high school math and personal finance teacher in Maryland. I run my own business called Phi Educator, where I help teachers get high quality resources that help make personal finance a fun,
engaging, exciting topic in school. That aim of getting kids really excited about learning about money and really just kind of getting a grasp on how they can manage their own wealth in the future. I have published a children’s book in the past called “Emma’s for Money.” This is for three to eight -year -olds to help them learn basic money words and start conversations at home about money.
And I have a little bit of entrepreneurship stuff going on as well. I love talking about entrepreneurship routines. As you can see, Doug, these guys done nothing about kids and money. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Next time, we’ll get a better, more quality. qualified group next time.
We’re going to have a great panel today, diving into all these topics. But first, the reason we can make this for free is we’ve got some great sponsors. Hang out with us for just a couple minutes and say hello to these wonderful sponsors who keep the show free for us.
All right, we’ve got John Lanza here, Rob Fila and Maya Korbick. So let’s get this party started. (upbeat music) Normally,
we begin our shows with a piece that we operate around, something from the popular press, but you know what, guys? I didn’t think we needed to do that today. I think what we need is, we really need to set the stage about kids and money and about why this is so important.
John, with your money mammals, a whole brand and all the stuff you do, why do you think it’s so important to teach kids good money habits at a young age? Well, the thing about kids is they’re going to learn about money and be exposed to money at age one or two,
right? And that’s why really, this is all about starting an open, honest conversation with them. That’s going to go from the age you first begin, like I said, could be one or two, until they really,
it’s probably never going to end. It’s going to be a lifelong conversation, this open conversation you want to have about money. And you really want to engage them early. And this simple topic, we’re not talking about compound interest for a two -year -old.
We’re just talking about keep that money out of your mouth or how to engage in a transaction when you’re a parent. It’s just these are very simple things. The other great thing about starting early is that as a parent,
any baggage you have, you can just put that aside and just focus on the simple conversations. You know, what are the, you know, what are the denominations? How do I use money to spend?
When I go into the store, give them a little bit of money and they can have a little bit of fun buying something there. They learn how money gets exchanged. What you’re really doing is building up in them the language of money.
It’s the same way we read to our kids from a young age, even though they can’t necessarily read back to us at a very young age. You’re providing the building blocks for the money conversation that is going to take off.
off as they get to be five and 10 and 15 and beyond. Maya, did you get much of a money education growing up? No, I didn’t. But I did. It wasn’t formal education. It was more watching my parents how they handled money.
So there were a lot of good things that I learned. There were some things that I didn’t learn like investing and management of credit cards and debt. I am an immigrant. I’m a first generation immigrant. So when we immigrated,
I watched my mom’s story. that dollar like she budgeted, she cooked, she did whatever she needed to, to make sure that we can make ends meet. Rob, how about you? Much of a money education as a kid?
I don’t think I swallowed any quarters. So I must have gotten something from John’s lessons. The taste of silver is fantastic. That dirty greasy penny. I mean, something better. No,
I don’t think I got a ton. It’s kind of like what Maya said. A lot of observing what my parents were doing. Thanks for watching. Money was not a dinner table conversation topic in my household, really. You mind your own business when it comes to asking about household finances,
and then when you started having your own money from birthdays or holidays, whatever it was, it was kind of yours to spend and do what you want with. And I don’t remember getting much form education other than probably being forced to save a little bit of it,
like put some of it into a bank account. My earliest money memory is like opening a bank account, having a little like passport book thing, and writing in my bank account. each time when I took money in or took money out. Yeah,
nothing more formal than that until I probably got into high school. Well, let’s help our parents in the audience do a little better than Rob. Let’s stick with you. If we’re thinking about summer vacation, let’s talk about some of the opportunities you have with kids.
Where do you start? What we really want with kids is we want to start letting them become comfortable talking about money. We want to build this mindset in this culture that it’s okay to talk about this. It’s not a It’s not a taboo topic.
It’s not something that should be off the table. And summer usually represents a time for a lot of families to maybe spend a little bit more time with each other. We’re not in full -time school. Maybe we get reduced hours in our job,
or we don’t, but at least everyone’s kind of around each other a little bit more. And maybe there is more opportunity for this. As John mentioned, you’re going to be introduced to money really early. I have a four -year -old. I take him into a store.
He tells me he wants things. And it didn’t take very long. long for that to happen. Like he very quickly was like, “Oh, this is right here, I want this, why can’t I take it?” And introducing that idea of trading,
that money is something that we trade for the things that we want, and also that we can’t have everything we want and need. It’s one of my favorite sayings from Paula is that like you can’t, you can afford anything but not everything. And trying to communicate that to kids from a very young age is really what I think this summer presents a great opportunity for.
And that could be through the books that you’ve read. the activities that you do, the places that you go. There’s so many different ways to teach kids about money that just exist in our lives every day. Yeah, I want to start off with you broach the topic of these open conversations and it’s okay to talk about money.
Mai, I saw you nodding your head. I guess you’re on that train. No, I am. And I actually just wanted to mention about vacation. Like one thing that we do with our kids and we’ve been doing it for many years is we actually use vacation as an opportunity to teach them.
them about money. So if we go somewhere, we give them a small allowance for that vacation, and we tell them, “This is yours to spend on this vacation. Do not ask for any more money. Do not beg. It’s yours to manage.
And you can spend it all up front or you can bring it back home. It’s entirely up to you, but take your time, pace yourself.” And it’s been a great learning opportunity because when we are on vacation,
we would be discussing. discussing like what are they going to do with that money and how are they going to spend it and why are they making the choices that they’re making. And then once they spend it, when we come back home, it’s usually like, did you make a good choice?
Was that the right way of doing things? Maya, do you ever take them to the casino and let them try to double the money that you allot to them? I mean, that’d be a great lesson. I think that’s the next step. That’s right.
Can I jump in? And I just want to underscore what Maya is talking about. The key thing here with the allowance or with any kind of money is being purposeful with it. Hers is kind of like this mini targeted allowance that’s happening during the vacation,
but the key thing is that then it’s now their money. Now that opens up a conversation naturally because there’s going to be some stuff they’re going to run into and want and not be able to get,
in which case you can set a goal that may not be enough time for a vacation, but it’s that purposefulness, it’s that why that Maya is talking about, which is so important,
because I think a lot of parents have some difficulty with the term allowance, right? They want to get over the hump that I’m just giving my kid something, and if you don’t have a purpose to it without a doubt,
it is a handout. But if you are purposeful with it, right, and the whole goal is to give our kids experience with money, which is what Maya is talking about, then it becomes something that’s very valuable to you.
you and to them. How old are your kids, Maya? So I have a 16 and a 15 year old. It’s funny because your plan there worked really well for us at Disney. And Rob, to your point at the store,
you know, my kids, my, my twins now 28, but when they were seven, eight, nine years old, always wanted stuff. And especially Disney, every ride ends in a gift shop, right? We get done with the experience and I want this,
I want this. So Maya, we gave our kids. an allowance every day and said, you can either save this for all the days of the vacation and buy something big on the last day. You can spend it every day or you can take it home.
And it was great because we got off the ride and there was no more, can I have at the end of the ride? It was yes, you can. Or no, my daughter on day one blew the entire amount of money after ride number one.
Day number two, she got really smart. and the money lasted till the end of the day. My son didn’t spend a nickel the entire time that we were on vacation, brought the whole thing home, brought the entire thing back home with him.
But it was great. And I love the way that you talk about circling back, you know, circling back and going, was that a good decision? Yeah. And I find that really interesting because like see both of your children chose different paths when it comes to money.
And like you can see the progression in terms of learning for your daughter, but I find that kids have different money. personalities too, which, you know, when we give them that allowance to manage, we learn about their money personality so that we can hopefully direct them in the positive direction,
I guess, when it comes to that money. So, you know, I have one child that’s more of a spender and another one is more of a saver. So my son is kind of like your son, he would probably bring more money home.
But, you know, with both of them our approach shifts a little bit. bit. It’s different and it’s tailored towards each child. And the conversations are a little bit different too. Yeah,
it is. It’s funny. My son and my daughter, as twins, you’d think they’d be closer to this polar opposite. My daughter’s like me will blow any dollar that ever enters her wallet. My son is an engineer for Microsoft,
has 14 rental properties and is still always happy that me pay for everything every time he comes home. Every single time it is it is incredible how almost 30 year old still is the same that he was eight Rob,
I do want to get back though to this idea of open conversations because it begs this question Not just this summer, but whenever you’re talking about money with your family, how open is open?
Are you including them in the bill paying? Are you telling them what your net worth is? Are you talking about hard numbers? – So it’s one of those, we wanna have age appropriate conversations.
And one of the best things that I think we can do is let our kids see us having these money conversations, these money moments. So if you are sitting down to write a paper check, I don’t know if that make people that do this still anymore, but if you are, let them look at it,
let them see what you’re doing and what happens to this paper check, what does that represent? If you’re having a monthly budget meeting or a weekly one or whatever you do with your spouse, if you have one, that’s a great one to just let your kids see.
be a part of, like, “Hey, we’re talking about how we’re going to spend our money this week or this month. Do you have anything you want to spend money on?” And you invite them to be part of that conversation. But you make it very clear that we’re intentional with how we spend our money.
We don’t just walk into a store and buy whatever we feel like. So he goes grocery shopping with me every single weekend. And I’ve yet to have a tantrum that was due to him wanting something from the shelf.
We have tantrums for other reasons. But not for that particular reason, which is great. because he understands when we go in, there’s a list, there’s an order that we’re going to get things in. We’re not pulling things off at random. It makes it stop me from buying a ton of crap too,
though, I will say, like, it’s great for keeping me accountable. That’s kind of what we want our kids to do. We want to get involved in their play. Like, if you see them starting to play a game that has money involved, get down on the floor and play with them.
And that’s all you have to do is just kind of let them explore how money works through their play and just be part of that conversation. If they have questions, ask about it, or role play, what you need to do. But it’s very easy.
It’s not a, you don’t have to be super purposeful about having these conversations. They come up all the time. But John, how open do you get? It’s really a personal conversation. I feel like one of the easier places to do this is if you’ve set up,
this is one of the things we did with our kids, if you’ve set up a 529 for them for college, then that’s a great place. to talk to them so they can see how it’s growing over time.
They get a sense of, they can start comparing and contrasting colleges. As I remember having a conversation, in the back seat were two kids. We live in Los Angeles,
so they’re talking about USC and UCLA, and they’re comparing the two and back and forth. They know Trojans, Bruins, and I said, one big difference between USC and UCLA. is the price.
So we got to keep that in mind. Now, however, whatever quality those schools are, one is double the price of the other. Now, I don’t mean to be knocking– – So kids, we’re Bruins fans in our house. (all laughing) – But I had to step in just because we had started that 529 conversation.
And I think it’s important for them to see, because then they realize that there is a school that is going to cost double the price. we’re only going to have a certain amount left and you’re going to end up having to take out certain amount of loans in order to go to that school,
whereas we’ve got it covered if you go to the state school. So that’s the 529 is a good place to start there. In terms of kind of the overall being super transparent about it,
I mean, that’s such a just personal discussion. Like, we didn’t sit down with our kids and go through all the dollars and cents that we have. Yeah, Fred. kind of for all of you, like if they ask, how much does mom or dad make?
How do you answer that question? – I actually get that question a lot when I do workshops from parents and my answer to that has always been, why do you wanna know? And the reason why I ask that is because I need to ask them why they’re asking that so that I can formulate my answer back to them.
Sometimes they’re asking because maybe they’re scared. You know, they heard the economies. is tanking and they don’t know if we’re going to be able to make our mortgage payments. Sometimes they’re asking because they’re comparing themselves to their friend who is,
you know, going on all these vacations or can buy shoes that maybe they don’t have. It’s all about like why they’re asking. And then once I understand that, then I can actually formulate the right answer.
When we talk about money and kids, I’m wondering if you guys have a favorite game, Rob, you mentioned games, right? Getting on the floor and playing a game with them. Any great money game that you really like playing with kids that kind of teaches them about money,
Rob? For the younger kids, I think they like playing grocery store. We have one of those little kid Fisher Price cash registers in our house, and we have some play food around, and he will ask us to make a list,
and he goes and puts the items into his little cart, wheels it over, we check them out, and he pays with some fake play money. that we have. And I think that’s a wonderful way to do it. Um, it’s getting older. I really love Monopoly.
Monopoly is my favorite money game. And I use it in my high school classes all the time. I like starting fights. I get to have a fight in my classroom. I have 12 different ways that I play Monopoly with the students that,
you know, finishes with it in a class period. So you don’t get to that fourth hour where everyone’s like really dragging and they’re like, whatever, and flips the board. Yeah. There’s so many ways to tie money lessons into it. it if you just kind of think about the monopoly as a medium for having money conversations.
So like, are we tracking cash flow? Are we going to talk about investing? Are we going to talk about insurance? Like tomorrow, we’re going to play monopoly and we’re going to do an insurance monopoly, which is really fun, which I think we talked about once. You were like one of the brainstorm OG people for that.
Nothing gets Joe to judge somebody faster than their thoughts on monopoly. So I don’t know if you’ve caught it, Rob, but I was looking at his. face when you said Monopoly. You got a hole to dig out of, man. I think he’s going to be just fine.
Maya, how about you, Games? Well, I tend not to play Monopoly with my husband, because that ends up being bad. He is very competitive.
And even when our kids were little, like he did not care whether or not they lose. And so we don’t play that. as often in our family. But I like playing cash flow by Robert Kiyosaki. I know that a lot of people find that a little bit confusing and hard to explain to kids,
but I find that with us because it’s kind of two on two. We only have two kids. So it’s like one has my husband can help one child. I can help the other child to understand how that game works and what the purpose is,
which is to get out of the rat race. So I really. really enjoy that. And I find that it helps them think a little bit differently about money. John, how about you? Did you guys ever play the game of life?
That was definitely a yes, Gen X game, right? And you didn’t want to end up as always going to bring this one up. Yeah, you didn’t want to end up as a philosopher, poor and broke. And this I was talking about a judgmental game.
Either be a doctor, a lawyer or a philosopher. I forget about the other things you you could be. And it was all the spin of that. It was a super fun game to play. And then you’d have your family with those little pieces that you’d put into your car.
But we, funny enough, we’re a board game family. So we do a lot of kind of resource allocations at Catan and Ticket to Ride. Now, my kids are now 21 and 18, and they’re a little less interested in these games than they were back when I was,
when their kids weren’t the most important center there. their universe, but we played a lot of those games, but not, and we played some Monopoly. And I know on the podcast, when we talked, Joe, you said Monopoly Jr.
is really one of your favorite games to help teach kids about money, which I thought was kind of cool. – Yeah, no, Monopoly Jr. was a really good one for my kids. Just the idea that the piece of paper that had a three on it,
versus the one that had a two on it, versus the one that had a three on it. one on it was like a big aha for my kids. Because when we first went to that game, they were like, well, I’ll just give you one of these. I’m like, well, no, no, no, that little symbol on there means something.
I remember my kids that like Rob, maybe at four years old were like, oh, oh, that means my monopoly junior right now. And it’s like really helping you have a basic math concept, the idea of things having different values,
even though they kind of look the same. Yeah. Money is this placeholder for what I guess a dollar truly is. Yeah, super. super good. We’re going to get more into tactics. We’re going to talk about investing in the second half of the show.
But at the halfway point, we have this year long competition between our frequent contributors, which are Paula Pan, OG, and my mom, who never likes to play.
And she always had somebody sit in for her. So, Maya, you’ll play on behalf of Paula, Rob, I believe we agreed back stage that you play on behalf of OG. John, you’re going to play for– mom. Did we do it that way?
Is that what we said? Yes. That means, John, you’ve got some good news and some bad news. Would you like the good news or the bad news? I’ll take the bad news first. Well,
the bad news is, is that mom stepped into play for Len Penzo, who unfortunately had to leave our show as a frequent contributor and he was first place, which means that you’re going to have to guess first.
but that also is the good news is that you are in this year, a three way tie for first. Mom has four, OG has four, Paula has four, which means, by the way,
Maya, good news for you, because Paula, who is otherwise brilliant, is always in last place in our trivia. You get to guess last. So Rob’s going to go in the middle. So that’s the way we play everybody,
but we need a question. Doug, you said you had. some toothy trivia. What’s going on? Hey there,
Stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. You know, I ran into one of the neighborhood kids, Dylan, at the dentist today, and he was being so mean to me for no reason. First, he tried to make fun of me for reading Highlight Magazine.
Magazine’s awesome. He said it’s for babies, which has not kept my cool. for a really long time, but after a while I finally threatened to tell him the Tooth Fairy. Tell on him.
I didn’t know if she even takes comments like Santa does, but I think anyone giving him money ought to know what kind of jerk that kid is. The whole conversation left me so flustered,
I accidentally left the office with their highlights magazine. That’s a good Kufas move. Today’s trivia question is a quarter according to Delta Dental, how much is the average tooth fairy payout for one tooth?
I’ll be back right after I finish finding everything in the hidden pictures puzzle. God, I love highlights. I like this. Delta Dental just released the new number, which was a little bit surprising.
So let’s start off then, John. You’ve got the first guess. With kids, your kids’ age, you’ve you might be a little bit beyond the tooth fairy, John. We might be.
We might be. I hope we are. You know, I’m going to do my best gallant here and try to get this right. And I will apologize to your mom right now if I get it wrong.
I actually read this and I cannot remember it. I’m pretty sure I read this number. You gave me a hint. You said it was surprising. So I’m going to go with like… $5 .50 a tooth, $5 .50 is John’s answer.
Rob, what do you think? Is that high or low? I think he’s probably pretty close to it. I don’t know who’s driving inflation here because I get it with Christmas. I get it with other stuff where like you have companies driving inflation,
everyone wants you to spend more. Who is driving the inflation on the tooth fairy? Why are we not still doing quarters people? people? My son saw a book recently, it was like a Pete the cat book and they were doing quarters.
I’m like, great, if you think it’s a quarter, that’s awesome. Let’s keep it that way. I am gonna guess that it is $4 .75. – 4 .75, so Maya, there they are.
550 from John, 4 .75 from Rob. What are you thinking? – Oh, I’m thinking, I think John is right there. I would say,
$5 .25. She splits the uprights. Goes right between them at $5 .25. All right, those are our guesses. Let’s see who is right in just a moment.
All right, John, you set the bar initially by saying $5 .50. Once you heard Rob and Maya, who came in below you,
what do you think? I think you’re right. You feeling good or not? I’m feeling okay. I’m feeling okay. I may have anchored them, but we’ll see what happens. I’m just glad Maya didn’t go with 551 and pull the prices right on me.
That’s exactly what I thought she was going to do. Let’s we’ll get back to Rob. Maya, how come you didn’t go 551? Are you too nice for that? No, I actually,
I did a survey of that. of the parents on my Instagram page before and I was surprised some people still give $2, nobody gives quarters Rob anymore, they would have to pull all their the kids deep out in order to actually,
you know, afford something with the money that they get from the tooth fairy so I got a lot of $2 ones $5 was most common some people give more than that from what I found so I just thought if you’re averaging it out like probably I would say $5 but but Rob was kind of right below it.
So that’s why I went with 525. Well, and Rob, you had the low guess at 475. Is that based on your quarter comments? That wishful thinking you tried to keep that inflation down? I don’t know. But clearly I don’t understand how to play this game.
I should have just said like a cent and then I had a much wider window. Uh, no, actually, I think it’s going to shock us now. And now I’m like, it’s probably going to be closer to $20, something related to this is going to pop here. Some parent is paying like a thousand bucks a tooth and that’s driving driving the average up for all the rest of us.
Well, let’s see what it is. Doug, who’s taking home the championship today. Hey there, stackers. I’m avid highlights reader and guy who’s finally got all of his adult teeth,
not to brag, Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug. Today’s trivia question is, according to Delta Dental, how much is the average tooth? tooth fairy payout for one tooth? The answer?
Us mere mortals aren’t the only ones affected by changing economic conditions. Even ethereal beings feel the effects of inflation and deflation. According to Delta Dental,
the average payout from the tooth fairy in 2023 was $6 .23 per tooth. But so far in 2024, kids have seen a 6 % drop with payouts per tooth averaging only.
I’m not gonna tell you that. But I will tell you, it’s $1 .09 more than what Rob said and 59 cents more than what Maya said and just 34 cents more than what John said because the average payout per tooth now is $5 .84 with 4 cents making $5 .84.
our winner. – Nice job, John playing on behalf of mom for the first time. So mom’s first appearance and your first time.
Would you like to give a speech? – I would. I wanna just thank Maya for not going to 551. I appreciate it. And I just wanna thank your mom for being your mom and giving me the opportunity to compete in this wonderful competition.
Thank you. And for the record, we would pay a dollar to our kids for each tooth. The problem was we would go to bed and forget about the tooth. It took, I think, for one of my kids,
it took like two weeks for her to get one of her teeth paid for. Talk about bad parents. And we’d get a “my bad” from the tooth fairy. Or a little interest thrown in there or something like that. Oh, yeah. They must have forgotten.
I guess the tooth fairy had too much wine. wine. Tooth Fairy got cut up on Yellowstone. Forgot about it.
Time for the second half of this podcast, second half brought to you by depositaccounts .com. Rob, you know what happens when you go to depositaccounts .com? I’m guessing you look at deposit accounts. You find out that those brick and mortar savings and checking accounts that you have.
that those are probably not best in class at depositaccounts .com by Lending Tree, you could compare more than 275 ,000 deposit rates from over 11 ,000 banks of credit unions all for free.
And I just pulled it up. And of course, you’re gonna wanna check yourself because we record this a few days before it goes live. If you have a national average savings account,
you’re earning 0 .51%. But according to deposit accounts, if you’re in the top 1 % of all savings accounts, 4 .92, almost 5%. Money market accounts,
top 1%, 4 .81 national average, 0 .87. You can compare to Switch and Save at depositaccounts .com. Get that money working for you a little bit. And by the way,
why do you guys think the Tooth Fairy’s taking it on the chin this year? Down 6%. Anybody have a theory? Bye for now. you’re the CPA. What do you think, uh, maybe some deflationary pressure on the?
I was going to say, I think it’s the economy. It’s, you know, parents are cutting back. So they’re cutting back on the tooth fear, right? Yeah. I heard that kids want to be paid in robux instead of dollars.
So the exchange rate’s way better for parents right now. When you said robux, I thought you were going to say blockchain. Kids want to be paid in blockchain now. That wouldn’t work, would it? Yeah. No, that’d be a whole. whole different one You know what though and I meant to just crack that as a joke But let’s start there here in the second half guys investing in saving Rob You made a great point During the first
half which was around the idea that you got this passbook, right? And you you put your money in the passbook, but we also had paper money your kids Not growing up in that type of a place.
I mean you pull out plastic when you spend money You Your investments are all electronic. How do you teach kids about the differences in numbers and the importance of money when it’s all electronically done?
- I think, especially if you’re starting at the younger ages, you keep everything physical to start with. So you start with physical money. My son’s allowance is single dollar bills. So he can count them very easily. He can see how much he has.
He has a spend, save, and give container by container. It’s one of those, what do you call it? Benji box from Benjamin Talks, I think is the name of the company. Their club is a clear container one that you can see how much is in there.
Until he is older, I think, and has really mastered physical money, we’re not going to venture into the digital stuff just yet. I love the apps that are out there. I think they’re really cool for doing allowances and families,
but we’re not ready yet at four. I think that’s something that’s going to come a little bit later. So I’m guessing the other two probably have some more insight on this. one than I do. Yeah. Maya, the piggy bank is great, but the kid sees you at the store and you’ve got plastic.
I mean, I remember my kid saying, “Hey, I know you said you don’t have any money, but you’ve got that plastic thing. Why don’t we just put that through and get some more?” Yeah. You know what? It’s actually really interesting because when I was doing my workshops in schools,
I noticed that a lot of kids actually think that just because you have that plastic card that you have a limited amount of money on it or or if you go to an ATM machine that that machine just gives you money.
So a lot of them, even some parents would tell me like, my child is just asking, like, why don’t you just go to an ATM machine and pull the money out? So it’s important to explain how the money gets into that ATM machine and how it’s actually linked to an account.
And I like to explain to the kids that these accounts in the banks are kind of like a giant piggy bank that like holds the money and everybody kind of of has their own account or their own piggy bank, but where I found the kids got really,
really confused. And I would say up to grade two, it was when I would ask them, okay, so now let’s say we spent all the money from the account you paid with your,
let’s say bank card. So there’s no more money in the account. What was confusing to them was where does the money come from? And it was so interesting because I was like, well, think about it. Like, what do your parents do?
every day? Like where do they go? Like I would be teaching let’s say a class of 30 kids and there would be like one kid Maybe that would like link the fact that their parent goes to work and that’s where the money comes from It’s actually deposited into the account.
So like Rob I really like the idea of actually teaching them with the actual cash With coins and bills and then slowly when they’re old enough switching to the online bank Then to the plastic stuff.- Yeah. – And even as a household, like you could go into like an envelope system for a little bit, so they can see the physical cash of the household and how it gets spent, and then kind of explain, okay, now we’re gonna put into the bank, and just spend that.
So they’ve seen the stack of ones for your salary and how it gets allocated. Like that could be a really cool thing to do. – How do you guys do that with credit, with kids using credit? And I guess this is probably more of a junior high,
high school, age conversation. John, what do you think? about kids and credit? We’ve gotten our kids credit cards now that they’re 18 and over. But before that, we just focused on the debit card so that we can kind of track their expenses.
And there’s plenty of those kind of on the market where you can track their expenses. I agree with both Maya and with Rob about the idea that you should start with cash because one,
there is research that shows it’s harder for kids to kind of part with cash, but two, just learning how to how transactions are going and giving dollars and getting dollars back, getting change back, and then switching over to the digital side.
But there is a case to be made for doing digital young. I mean, I was talking to one of my podcast guests and she has her kids at seven years old and five years old on a card. She’s doing that because she wants to make sure that she has consistent allowance given to them and she’s very on top of that allowance system.
So I still think for us, that’s what we did was cash and I would still do that and then transition around tween to the idea of a debit card, but I don’t think you really have to get into a credit card until they’re kind of 18 or over.
But just on the apps, I think like what most apps are doing to compensate for the lack of physical money is they have to make the app very visual for kids. There has to be like large numbers or even pictures of how much is in the account or how it’s moving.
from place to place. So it kind of simulates that physical act of money or if you can’t have that, maybe having a chart up on the fridge or one of those family money ladders where you can actually physically move your little token up and down to match how much you have so the kids can see it.
That I think at least would at least replicate the physical money in some way if you are going to go to school. Just the more tangible appearance you’re saying Rob, the fact that you can see it better. I mean even adults do that. Like how many of us have made a savings chart or when you were doing your debt pay down like you Made a debt pay down chart because you just wanted to see some physical progress It’s the
same thing. We like visual representations of what we’re doing like money in a bank or on a credit card is very Abstract it’s hard to imagine. It’s why we spend it to game. If I said a little bit which makes it easier to grasp on too I want to talk about the debt before you move on Well,
no, that’s exactly what I want to get back to because I do want to get kids and credit cards Like when do you start introducing them to credit before they go off? on their own and blow out their credit immediately, like I did? – I wish I had the person who shared the story with me,
but it was a really great story. And it was, what they did was they purposefully introduced debt to their kids, but they kept it within like the bank of mom and dad. So they waited for their kids to ask them for something that was more than what they had.
And instead of saying, no, you have to save for it, they allowed them to take a loan from the parents. So they said, okay, yeah, you can buy this thing, it’s a hundred bucks. You have $50. That means you’re going to borrow $50 from me. We’re going to create a debt payment contract.” So,
you know, every time you get allowance, 20 % of that is going to come to me until the debt is paid off. And you just, within the space of your family, you start creating, again, more practice opportunities, which is what allowance is all about in the first place.
And you let them do it in the safety of your home so that they’re not messing around with a credit card for the first time when they start dealing with debt. Your kids are in this age range right now, 16, 18. What are you doing? with credit cards? – Yeah,
so actually there’s like two things I want to mention with regards to that. When our daughter was little, she actually started doing what Rob was just mentioning, but it just naturally happened. She ran out of money,
she needed $2. It’s like, hey, can I borrow $2? And then the next time I was like, oh, well, you know, I still ran out of money, can I borrow more money? And it just became, I think I started getting very concerned because it became a habit.
habit. I think that we, because we were so busy and I think all parents are, we were really not keeping up on top of her, like to give us that money back or pay back an interest.
So at one point we were like, okay, you have to pay all of that back. And I think we gave her, it was such a long time ago, she was very little, but I think we gave her certain things she had to do to pay back or whatever, and it just did not work for us.
That doesn’t mean that it will not work for other people. people. But I really got scared because she just got into this habit of borrowing and it became natural. And then because she couldn’t borrow from us, she asked her brother to borrow money from him.
He actually didn’t lend her some money. And again, I think she but he was merciless, like he made her do whatever she was supposed to do. I don’t know if it was do like empty out his dish the dishwasher for him or something like that.
Alone shark. Yeah, 100 % my my son is like, Joe, when you describe your son, I’m like, that sounds like my son. I think he’s going to be like that at 30. – It’s not good. – But the thing is, when it comes to credit cards,
I find it absolutely crazy that we don’t spend time to teach our kids about credit cards until the age of 18. And at that time, most of them have moved away from home and we have very little control over them.
All of a sudden, it’s like a knife, right? Like credit cards. card can be used for good and bad, and you’re giving them this tool, this potentially harmful tool, but we haven’t educated them.
So with my own kids, what I have done is I’ve added them on as authorized users. Now, I’m located in Canada, but you guys in the U .S., if you have a really, really good credit rating, you can add them on as authorized users,
and they can actually, they end up having your credit rating by the end of the day. time they’re 18, which is amazing. You’re building their credit rating. But the idea is, the reason why I added my kids on as authorized users,
I gave them a small limit that they can spend on credit card. And we go through the credit card statements together and, you know, like I show them to pay it off and fold by the end of each month,
I’m trying to teach them how to manage that credit properly. And I’m explaining to them that that credit is so important to maintain. because one day they’re going to need it to buy their first car or home or whatever.- John, how did you handle this? – Well, I have to give my credit to the real OG on our side, which is the OG money mammal, my wife. She set up exactly what Maya did.
So we, both of our kids, their first credit cards were as authorized users and that’s a great way to go. The nice part about the debit card is you kind of get into that. habit of going over the expenses that your kids are making on their debit cards,
and that’s really a very important thing. And so as a parent, ’cause I think one of the key things for all of this is that everything we’re talking about here is just a tool, right? So we have to be their guides on this Money Smart journey.
And we can’t, and I don’t think that’s gonna end. Once they get jobs, we’re gonna be the ones who want to remind them. them about matching to the extent that they have a job where their employer will match their 401k.
We wanna make sure that when they put their money into that 401k that it’s not just sitting in a 401k, but it’s actually investments. So this is an ongoing thing as they become grownups,
but these are just tools. And I think what Maya said is a great way to go about the credit card side of things. And then they will have had a good time. with plastic, with the debit cards. The nice part is now so many kids have these debit cards,
that conversation actually kind of come from the kid. They’ll come back and say, “Oh, you know, my friend has this debit card. Can we talk about having a debit card?” And then you can open up that discussion.
And again, that gets back to the importance of having started this discussion from a young age. Which is, it’s just… early because one good, this is a simple example, but like our daughter lost her credit card and lost her debit card,
and there’s no worry that we’re going to be judging her about it. She’s immediately like, “Can you close it, can you shut it down for me until I find it?” That gets to this key point here,
which Maya made, which is we don’t want our kids going off and using plastic with no experience. And, early on, we don’t want our kids going off and using plastic with no experience. we can start that, not necessarily with plastic, but earlier we start conversation and then have a guided on ramp or onboarding into plastic.
Fantastic. That’s what we do as our guides for our kids on this journey. I think it also goes back to Rob’s opening comment during this entire discussion about having these open conversations in the beginning.
And then there is no shame. There’s, hey, you know, people mess up, things happen. happen and we just go take care of it.” Where I feel like if we’ve got a lot of shame around the discussion, we don’t talk about money,
you know, then we try to hide stuff and it gets, you know, that always works. Hiding it always makes it better, as I found out. That was sarcasm people, by the way, if you didn’t get that. Last question that I have for all of you today is this.
When you’re talking about investing, you know, I loved in high school, I loved that we would track some stuff. in my economics class, and we would go and we’d pick a few and follow them for one semester,
which certainly isn’t, you know, long enough to judge whether you made a good pick or not. But it was neat to see the ups and downs and to realize that some stocks pay dividends, some don’t. And the fact that the things that you buy,
actually, you can own those companies. But on the other side, you know, a lot of us know that that gives you a little bit of a gambling mentality back to Doug’s joke earlier. about just taking him to the roulette wheel at the casino.
Do we start off with indexing? Do we start off with the index fund, which is where we kind of hope that they end up and broader diversification? Or do we start off with, “Hey, you can own the companies that you love.
Let’s go right to the CPA here for this one first. Maya, where do you start?” So I’m of the opinion to start off with basics. And that’s kind of like what I did in my book. I– I explained that,
yes, you don’t need to only be a consumer, you can be the owner. So, you know, taking Apple, for example, you don’t only have to use Apple products, you can own Apple. I also like to remind them that investing is not gambling.
If you want excitement, look elsewhere. I think after we teach them the basics of what stocks are, how stock market works, I prefer to teach them about investing in index funds.
because then I can tell, I also tell them, when you buy one share, let’s say of ETF or if you buy an index fund, let’s say of S &P 500, you’re buying essentially,
you’re becoming an owner of 500 largest companies. So that will include Apple, it will include Nike and some of these other companies that you’re interested in. So I think it’s a better way to go.
You’re still owning these companies, but you’re you’re taking out the highs and lows or it’s not as risky. Rob, you’re working with high schoolers on this. Where do you start? Oh,
man, it’s hard because you want to encourage the excitement and interest that they have with also like tempering it down in terms of, yeah, we don’t want a gambling mentality about this. When I teach investing,
we’ll start by talking about how the stock market works, what it is, why it came about. So this idea of companies companies seeking public funding to allow them to grow faster and then exchange your own part of the company. And we’ll play the stock market game.
So we’ll do a stock market simulation. They are basically trying to day -tree because they’re trying to increase the value of their portfolio as much as possible in 10 weeks, which we know is not a good way to invest.
But at the end, we get to say, well, five of the 30 of you actually made money. The rest of you all lost money. Is that a coincidence? coincidence? Probably not. There’s some other wonderful simulations out there,
so particularly for parents, if you’re listening, free ones that you can do. There’s one called Build Your Stacks, and that’s sdax .com. That’s a 20 -year investing simulation based on real stock market data, and you can actually play with it.
You can do it as a group. You can do it as a family. And there’s a computer that will play each time you do it, and the computer will only invest in 100 % index funds. And you play enough times, you realize the computer wins 9 times out of 10.
There are individual stocks available, there are bonds, there are other commodities you can invest in, but the index funds seems to always come out ahead and not coincidentally, like that seems to be what happens. Jeremy Overhead Personal Finance Club has a time the market simulation that you can do.
So you try and time the markets, you try and buy at the right time, sell at the right time, and if you can do it three times in a row, you must be an investing guru because it’s impossible. (laughs) So it’s getting some random 10 year period and you’re trying to like gauge whether it’s going to go up or down at that time.
And Next Gen Personal Finance has some really great resources as well for building a mini index fund. So you give kids the Dow Jones, you give them all the companies from the Dow Jones and you showed the previous year’s performance.
And individually wise, you’ll see that there’s a huge range in terms of how an individual stock may have performed in a year. Then you put them in pairs and realize the range gets smaller, but it’s now the average is more positive. And then same again,
you keep grouping them in bigger groups and you realize, oh, the risk goes down when I group stocks into larger bunches and my potential reward goes down, but the average reward goes up,
which is kind of I think where my students really click with, okay, there’s something to this index fund thing. And I’ll usually tell them, like if you want to go, you know, take your shot on individual stocks, make that less than 10 % of your portfolio.
Let’s make sure we’re doing the majority of it is something solid like an index fund. And then yeah, go play with the other bit that is not going to make or break your finances probably. John, you’re talking to people about this all the time on the podcast.
Most of the experts you talked to come down where Maya and Rob are. Yeah, it’s a yes and approach, which is starting, I think the idea of starting with stocks with young kids just makes sense. A lot of times that’ll be just driven by their interest in it.
So I had. one guest on Samantha Paxton and her 11 year old came home and really wanted to get into investing. And that’s you don’t you don’t want to you want to take that excitement and turn it into learning.
But like Rob said, you only want to you want to have kind of like a mad money account. I think that’s what Jason’s Y of the Intelligent Investor calls it. So just, you know, only a small amount of your money invested in what you know,
you might be interested in. We did that with our kids. kids, starting at a young age. They wanted to invest in stock. We let them pick the stock. But once they got old enough, they started making money while they were working.
We had them open up Roth IRAs, something I learned from my buddy Bill DeWyte, something you’ve talked about, Joe. And that’s really important. And then there, you can start talking about index funds and putting money and focusing on the simple fact that the key element here for you is time.
Starting as early as possible and letting it go as long as possible. And you’ve got the advantage as a kid of starting super early. And you want to get that part across and then making sure that you’re consistently putting money into that account so that it builds over time.
So it’s a kind of a yes and thing, like using those stocks and then giving them that opportunity to invest in the low fee index funds. – I love the resources all of you brought up and I’m glad you brought up the– Bill DeWight because FamZoo and Bill,
what a great contributor also to this community. Guys, thank you so much. We could obviously go for 17, 18 hours, but now what we’ll do, we’ll turn people over to you and your channels and to follow you.
So let’s start Maya with you. Let’s talk about the book. Where can people get the book? The book is available on Amazon as well as online for any major book.
so yeah, they can get it there. It’s called From Piggy Banks to Stocks, the Ultimate Guide for a Young Investor. It is an awesome read. I got to take one home from Fincon with me, and it’s a wonderful resource for people.
Rob, you’ve got tons of stuff that, I mean, Emma’s for money. What do we want to talk about? Where do people follow you and your great work? Well, if you’re watching on YouTube with us right now, I do have a YouTube channel, so it’s @fieducators.
If you do, YouTube .com /forwards. you’ll find it. I have a lot of insights into my high school classroom there. So I record guest speakers. Joe has been one of the guest speakers in my school where I pick a personal finance topic and I bring an expert in to talk about it.
So it’s meant to be a resource for teachers to use in their classroom, but it would work really well at home too, especially if you wanna try and help your teen have a financial education because the school is not providing one. If you wanna follow me on social media @fieducator,
@fieducator is one of the best. you’ll find me on Facebook and Instagram. – And John, both of our listeners are gonna love the Art of the Allowance, but you gotta give us something.
What’s something you haven’t told anybody that’s coming up on the Art of the Allowance podcast that you can maybe break here on Stack Investments? – Well, I have a great conversation. If you want to hear about investing,
I’m talking to Evan Wilson, who was the co -host of the Money Jar podcast. for a number of years, and he is a very keen investing mind. That’ll be coming up in a few weeks on the Art of Allowance podcast,
and you can find that at easiest place to find everything for us is themoneymammals .com, and you can find the Art of Allowance podcast, you can find the Money Mammals for young kids. All the resources are all right there.- Yeah, just fantastic resources there. We will link to all of them. it in our show notes at stackybedgements .com. Rob, Maya, John, thanks for hanging out with us, guys. Doug, I think you got it from here,
man. What should be our takeaways from today’s show? – Well, Joe, here’s what stacked up on our to -do list after today’s show. First, take some advice from Maya and John.
Don’t underestimate the power of family fights and accusations of cheating over board games to help teach your kids about money. at a young age. Second, take a lesson from Rob Feelin.
A great way to teach your kids about debt is by letting them borrow money from the Bank of Mom and Dad at eye -wateringly exorbitant interest rates. That way they’ll always be indebted to you and will be forced to put you up at one of those luxury old people’s homes.
But the big lesson? Someone should start a Highlights magazine for adults. These things are amazing! amazing. No, not that kind of adult magazine. Come on.
Thanks to John Lanza for joining us today. You can find his podcast, The Art of Allowance, wherever you’re listening to me right now. We’ll also include links in our show notes at stackingbenjamins .com.
Thanks to Maya Corbick, CBA for joining us today. You can see and hear more of Maya at her YouTube channel, TeachKid. Teach Kids Money TV. And also thanks to Rob Feelin’ for talking all things kids and money with Joe today.
You could go all 21 Jump Street and enroll in John’s high school class about money or just take the easy way out and find his book, M Is For Money Wherever Books Are Sold. This show is the property of SB Podcasts,
LLC, copyright 2024 and is created by Joe Salcihi. Our producer. producer is Karen Repine. Karen and Joe get help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at stackingbenjamins .com along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots.
Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. This show is for entertainment purposes.
only, before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor Duggan. We’ll see you next time, back here at The Stacking Benjamin Show.
What’s wrong with you? It’s either this show or indigestion. I hope it’s indigestion. Why? It’ll get better in a little while.
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