When you teach people about financial literacy, you want to start as young as possible. For example, teaching kids the real value of a dollar, because many times children have no sense of its worth as they just get things for free. That really hit me today when I saw someone offering to buy a child tickets to a professional NBA game. These tickets aren’t cheap like a candy bar as they’re worth a lot of money.
When the person asked the child if he wanted to go, his reaction was surprisingly neutral. Even though he wanted to go, he treated it like it was free for them to get. If you were a child from a poor background and someone offered you tickets to an NBA game, you’d be over the moon. That contrast showed me how important it is to teach children the value of a dollar early on.
The best way to do that is to help them earn their own money. For me, this came through an allowance. Every two weeks I’d get, say, twenty dollars, and I could do whatever I wanted with it — save it, spend it, whatever. That gave me a real sense of value. So when someone gave me twenty dollars for my birthday, I truly appreciated it because I knew how long it took me to earn that same amount. Now imagine if I knew those NBA tickets were worth two hundred dollars. I’d be blown away by how generous that gift really was.
It’s one of those things where, when you’re teaching children about financial literacy, it’s important to make sure that they learn the value of money, either through earning it themselves or by implementing some kind of system like an allowance.