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Financial tips for parents to teach their children




Children often dream of the day they can call themselves grown-ups, but few look forward to — let alone think about — the financial realities of independence. It’s never too early to start teaching your children how to save money and spend responsibly.

“As parents, our job is to set our children up for success,” Bank of America’s Head of Deposit Products Erin McCullen said. “Giving our kids a strong foundation of financial skills like budgeting and saving is a key part in ensuring they thrive as adults and can concentrate on the things they love.”

Consider these financial tips from McCullen:

Establish a budget. Budgeting is a lifelong skill. Teaching young adults how to budget can help them plan spending, save money, create goals and address financial anxiety. According to a Bank of America survey, 52% of Americans said they didn’t start budgeting until they began their first full-time job.

If your kids are on the younger side, they likely don’t have a steady income, but you can still help them practice budgeting with allowances or gifts from relatives or friends. Keep it simple: teach them to track the money they receive and separate it into spend-now and spend-later categories.

Later, when you’re helping your kids create an adult budget, you’ll need to expand those categories to track expenses like housing costs and groceries. From there, measure these categories against their total monthly income. Ideally, they should have more money coming in than going out. This process can help identify must-have vs. want-to-have purchases while highlighting areas to cut back on spending or finding room to save.

Save regularly and consistently. Making consistent, automatic contributions to a savings account can create a mindset that will be valuable as your children get older.

“It is never too early to open a savings account,” McCullen said. “Even if your children don’t yet have any bills or financial obligations, teach them to set aside some of the money from their allowance or even gifts from family or friends. Helping children learn to save early-on, even for a small purchase, can help them develop a consistent savings habit over time.”

Young adults should also consider programs like Keep the Change, which helps build savings automatically by rounding up debit card purchases to the nearest dollar amount and transferring the change from a checking account to a savings account.

Make a finance checklist. Young adults have a lot on their minds at the end of their final semester at school. As they begin to transition from student life to the working world, one way to help them stay on track is to prepare a checklist of things to do before they graduate and start their jobs.

This list can include creating a budgeting and tracking strategy, opening a savings account to begin setting aside money from future paychecks or checking in with a financial planner to discuss transitions and what’s to come.

Taking time now to teach your children strong financial habits can help them develop lifelong financial skills and prepare them for their next adventure. The healthy habits they build today can help carry them to tomorrow and beyond.

Emphasize the importance of safe credit. Young adulthood is the right time to begin building credit because establishing good credit takes time. Building credit from a young age can help pave the way for major purchases and life moments, since credit impacts future living arrangements, the ability to purchase a car and even employment opportunities.

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