How To Teach Kids About Money | Parenting Uncovered | Dave & Ashley Willis

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Hello and welcome back to Parenting Uncovered. We are Dave and Ashley Willis. And today we are going to talk about how to teach your kids about money.

Money, money, money, money, money. Yeah, money. It's a tough one, big one. It's an important one, right? Because. And the Bible has a ton to say about money. At one of our exo marriage conferences, Ashley and I did a whole talk on money because it's a huge issue in marriage as well. I think a lot of times, because we don't get the right lessons as kids because our parents didn't feel equipped to train us. And then we carry that on generationally and we don't teach our kids. And so the same broken patterns of money get handed down generation to generation, but it doesn't have to continue that way. You can choose to change the narrative and change that generational cycle. And so a couple like, overarching principles about money. And again, the Bible has a ton to say. And we're not financial planners, so, you know, we're not going to tell you, like, where and how to invest in your 401k and all that, but a few overarching principles. Number one is that God owns everything. We're just temporarily temporary stewards or managers of it. And so once we realize that, okay, it's all God's. And I want to. I want to give what he's entrusted to me, use it well. I want to be generous. Generosity is so important. As followers of Jesus, we're called to be generous with our time, our talent, and our money. Being hardworking and diligent in our work, trying to earn money is important. Saving and planning for the future is important. But also not looking to money to be our source of identity or our source of ultimate security. Because when we do that, it takes away from God. And then a final principle is avoiding debt as much as possible. Because debt, it removes your freedom, and it's for freedom. Christ has set us free. And when we get in debt to anybody, we've given up some of our freedom. And so teaching some of those lessons to our kids, teaching them to delay gratification, to not buy something the moment that, that they see it and want it. And this goes for adults, too. You see that shiny new car? Don't go out and buy it and put it on credit. We need to have more restraint. We need to be able to delay gratification, live within our means. And we're going to talk specifically about kind of how to teach kids these lessons of stewardship. And we found a few tools that have helped the green light card. We'll talk about that.

Ooh, we love it.

Yeah. They're not a sponsor of the podcast, by the way. They should be.

Well, before we proceed, I wanted to share some important. Well, all the. All of the Bible is important, but some verses that I feel like when it comes to teaching kids about money are extremely important. So I got these kind of all put together@biblestudytools.com and I want to start out with Ecclesiastes 5:10. It says this. Whoever loves money never has enough. Whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income. This too is meaningless. And as you know, I mean, in Ecclesiastes we found out a lot of stuff is meaningless.

Well, Solomon was going through quite the midlife crisis.

I mean, he really was. I mean, it's a bible or it's a book in the Bible that really is. I feel like, I mean, we're technically midlife, so we can kind of get to where you get frustrated about just kind of how things go. But also, Solomon made a lot of choices and he was like, choices that he regretted. And he was living in the reality of those choices as like the wealthiest man.

Yeah, he had opulent wealth, could buy whatever he wanted, do whatever he wanted. And he did. But because it wasn't rooted in something more meaningful, it wasn't rooted really in his faith in God and making a bigger impact for God's kingdom. It was very self focused. He got to the top of the mountain and he was like, man, it's lonely and meaningless up here. And ultimately he ends that whole book, that sort of like journal about his midlife experience by saying, really, relationship with God is all that matters. It's not all this other stuff. It's not the wealth, it's not the pleasure. All that stuff is so temporary and so meaningless. But God is forever.

I love that. And it's such a good thing that we need to remember as adults, because I think when we're in the midst of our careers and it is going well, that's when we can become really obsessed with money and maybe turn away from God and our family, you know, by what we're giving our time and attention. And so it's important, again, we are modeling this for our kids and showing what is really important. And we need them to see in our own life that, you know, that God is number one and then our spouse and then them and everything else, you know, and money is something that we are, again, stewards of, like you were describing. And it is part of life. We need it to survive.

Oh, yeah.

And we can use it to bless others. And it's something that we don't need to fear or even think is just terrible. But we just need to be very careful with it. You know, in Romans, you had mentioned debt. In Romans 13:8, it says, Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another. I love that Paul is so brilliant and how he words things.

The continuing debt to love one another. The only debt that we never can fully pay is the love we give. But we also never, if we keep loving, we never run out of love to give. And it's just a beautiful picture of.

It is a beautiful picture and reminder. And he ends those verses by saying, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. So it's like you're doing what you're called to do. I love this. In Psalms 37, 16, and 17, it says this. Better the little that the righteous have than the wealth of many wicked. For the power of the wicked will be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous. And so, you know, we all are going to have. You know, there's times in our life where we'll have a little. And there's times in our life where we may have a lot. But it's really what they're saying is it's better to. To have a close relationship with the Lord and have just what you need than to have all the riches in the world and be in inside, you know, just like what Solomon was saying. So I love those verses. There's many, many that we can teach our kids. And I would even say one really great place to start in teaching our kids about money is to post verses like these on cards and have your kids memorize them. And there's been different points in their childhood where we've done this. We've written it down on a little placard or something and posted it and had, like, incentives for them to memorize it written right now in our school system. And I would encourage you check out your school system wherever you are and see if they offer this. But right now in our elementary schools, we're in a public school system. Our kids have, except for a couple years in there, have gone to public school nearly their whole childhood. And they do this thing called the Good News Club. It's sponsored by a local church that happens to be, like, right next door to us. And they basically, one day a week, pour into our kids for an hour and they challenge them to memorize a verse. They talk about what it means and how they can apply it to their life and they have a discussion and games and things about it. And so right now, those are the verses our kids are memorizing because they have an incentive the next week if they come back and remember that verse. But I remember when they were, gosh, I mean, as young as like three or four, we used to do this. And it really did. It's fun for them because it's a challenge. And I would say if you feel like that whole verse too much, start with part of it. Like, start with part where it talks about, you know, or like, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. I mean, that's a great verse about money too. And you not only have them, you know, learn that verse, but you also say, like, what it means, and you can use examples. And, you know, there's lots of books out there that can help you to do this. But I think that's where we really need to start when it comes to kind of forming their worldview of money. And they want to have a biblical view of money. And, you know, it's gonna be. I think if we don't try to give them kind of that proper place of money in their life, of where they should, how they should see money and how they are supposed to use money, then they're gonna get a lot of mixed messages. You know, as they grow older at school and in the families they're spending time with outside of our family and things like that. What they see on social media and.

All the things YouTubers celebrated with, with most YouTubers and most pop culture is just the decadence and opulence and fancy flashy stuff that costs a lot of money. And if we're just chasing after that, it's usually going to lead to financial ruin because we're going to spend money we don't have to get stuff we don't really need. And so it's kind of helping our kids reframe the value system. Not that money is bad, money is not evil. But the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. So when money becomes our love, our passion, our identity, that's when it really, really gets dangerous. And so coming back to just kind of the very practical nuts and bolts of teaching kids to manage finances, we've had some trial and error in this for sure. We never come to this as people who've got it all figured out. We're on this journey with you. But here's some things that we've done and some of it has worked. Better than others. So we incentivize certain valuable tasks. We pay for good grades.

Yep.

We'll give it because like, well, only.

For our, our high schoolers.

Right. You know, from high school up.

Because this is going to get you into a great school. And in Georgia, if you make a what, a 3.0, you get 80% of your college covered. In the state of Georgia, if you make a 3, 7, you get 100% of your tuition covered if you go to a Georgia school. So that's an incentive in and of itself.

Yeah, you just pay room and board, which is really good deal. At the state schools. At the state schools.

Right, the public state schools. And so, and they know this and they know that we personally don't want them to go into college with debt. Our parents, through the scholarships we received and also parental help. We didn't have school debt.

I mean, which is, I did not like and I don't take that for granted.

I did not come from a family of means per se. We definitely weren't in poverty, but we were just a very middle class family.

Yeah, it was a sacrifice.

It was a sacrifice and I am still forever grateful that, you know, they, they went to that great, great lengths. Not only, it's not even financially as much as just showing me like the freedom I could have. If I could work hard in school and get scholarships to go to the school of my choice, then that what, what a wonderful gift that would be, you know what I'm saying? To not have debt and also to look into grants, to look into all these things. And so that's why we pay our kids. We don't pay them for every grade. Like if they get an A, they get a certain amount. And do we even, do we pay for B's? I can't remember.

Yeah, I think we changed it over the years. I think they get paid for an A, they get nothing for a B. And for a C or below, they have to pay us.

They have to pay us.

Right? So like, so it eats into the A. So it's incentives to get, to get as many A's as possible. It has, it's helped, it's incentivized and it's teaching them because this is the way the world works. It's like hard work will be incentivized most of the time and good performance will be incentivized. And so not that you're just on this performance treadmill all your life, but to know that like, hey, when you work hard, good things happen. We do pay for Chores, right.

Well, weekly. Like they have other things that they.

It gives them a little bit of money to learn to manage.

You know, also babysitting our older boys, babysitting our younger boys.

Our youngest just usually blows his money immediately on video games. And we try to teach him like, all right, on Roadblocks, if you do that, then you're gonna find something you really want, not have any money. And so sometimes we let him make some mistakes so that when they find something they really do want, it's like, well, buddy, you've spent, you, you spent your allowance five weeks in a row. As soon as you got it on this video game, you got nothing to show for it. But if you will save for the next couple weeks, then you can afford it. Now, once our kids get to like fifth grade, we let them use something called Greenlight, which I referenced earlier, which is a parent controlled debit card that you manage through an app. So the kid gets a debit card with their name on it, with whatever picture they want on it. It's an actual visa or MasterCard that you can spend, spend anywhere. And the parent directly puts money on there or takes money off. So you can help manage it.

There's no overdrafting.

There's no overdrafting. You can see what they're spending on. It gives them the ability to start being able to make purchases, to be able to learn how to make transactions at a store or a restaurant or online. If they go to Amazon, they find something they want for 10 bucks and they can fill in the card information and do that. But then they manage in the app, they see that this is real money. This is not a credit card where you're going to pay later. Like, it's real money that instantly goes out of the account. So we've helped to manage that. Our oldest, just this last year, we got him an actual checking account at a bank that I can help manage. You know, I can help like directly put money in when needs to.

Because he's two hours away in college.

Yeah, because he's off at college. But he's learning. He's learning to manage money now, kind of semi being on his own. And so at age appropriate levels, we try to give them age appropriate freedom as it relates to finances. We help out. Obviously our kids have never missed a meal.

No.

But there have been moments where we've let them feel that kind of temporary pain of having made poor financial decisions.

And not having money.

Right. And then again, temporary pleasure leads to permanent regret. You buy something with an impulse in A moment that feels good in the moment. And then later, when you find something you really want more and you don't have the money for it. That's a good life lesson.

And we. I've been there.

We've all been there.

I remember the first time I overdrafted when I did my parents, I think when I was 16 or 17, let me have an account. I didn't understand you could overdraft. Like, I just kind of.

I didn't either. I did the same thing. I was like, oh, man, this card works.

It works great. And then it charged me $25 a pop for every single transaction that was overdrafted. And my. At the time, they didn't allow parents to have that dual account where you can see it and be alerted or whatever. And my mom, like, I think it happened where I had racked up $150 just of the overdraft fees. That's not even counting what I spent, because I didn't understand. And you better believe it. I never made that mistake again. I was like, we had to go to the bank and explain. I think they knocked off a couple of the transaction fees for the overdraft or whatever. But I learned my lesson. I had to pay, you know, because I was overspending.

Expensive lessons.

I mean, I do think sometimes the failure itself teaches you that lesson. You do not forget that. I want to say this, too. We have a policy, and I know a lot of families like that we know have the same policy that when you turn 16, you have your license and you're driving. You have to get a job. Like, you can pick wherever you want that job to be, but you have to get a job. And so our oldest, he decided he wanted to work at Jimmy John's, and that turned out to be a great job for him.

Now, well, his first job was a.

Dishwasher at another restaurant, a local restaurant. He hated it.

He hated being a dishwasher. And so I'm like, all right, well, you know, it's a good place to start.

It is a good place.

But now you build on that experience and find something you want to do more. And he did. And he really enjoyed Jimmy John's.

He did. And he worked his way up. He got some raises there. In fact, he recently, he's become friends with, like, the.

Which is a sandwich shop.

Oh, yeah, it's a sandwich shop. The best subs, in my opinion.

Also not a sponsor of the podcast, but.

But we would love that. It was the first meal I wanted after I had Cooper Which. Which is really ironic that that's where he ends up working in high school. But anyway, so Cooper worked there. They love him. They told him anytime you're back, like, in the summer, you're welcome to work here.

Connor just applied there.

Yes.

He had a movie theater job. And then Connor tried his own business.

Well, can I tell that story really quick? All right, so Connor, his first job, he got a job at the movie theater. And really great people that he worked with, and, in fact, his best friend worked there with him, but they ended up putting them on different shifts, and then they kept on putting Connor, probably because he would have to work later. They put a lot of the teenage boys on the later shifts so the girls don't have to be driving home at night, which is fine. And I understand that. But Connor is so much a morning person and not a night person. And so he hated having to come home at, like, 12:30 at night. And so anyway, hey, we have Jimmy Evans. Jimmy Evans, if you're watching online, where.

The legend himself is here.

I love it. So see ya. But we. I remember he got that job at the theater and was driving home at, like, 12:30 in the morning, technically, and he just. He just hated it. Like, he hated having to be there for all those long hours. And so we were like, well, you have to have a job. So what do you want to do? Do you want to get a new job somewhere else or something else? And he said, I have a great idea. I've done research, and I realized that a lot of people need their. Their dumpster bins. Like, their big. The dumpster bins that, like, the trash companies come and get. They need those power washed. And so he said, I'm gonna take the money I have. I'm gonna go on Craigslist or ebay, wherever, and get this. Actually, I think it was Facebook Marketplace. I'm gonna. I see there's one used. I'm gonna talk this lady down and negotiate a lower price, and I'm gonna get this power washer, and then I'm gonna call it the Can Clean Can Crusader. The Clean Can Crusader. That's right. He even took a chatgpt and had it do its own, like, logo. Logo. That's really cool. And then he basically was like, can you just post on Facebook? Because he doesn't have a Facebook account. He was like, can that. I have this business. And I also went to Nextdoor and posted about it and put his number there. He created business cards and everything. And sure enough, he had all these people Call him. Even some businesses called him. And I mean, he would have. It's a nasty job, you guys, like, cleaning out old. Like, one of them was, like, old diapers.

Oh, God.

And the Georgia heat had just kind of melted into the trash can and, like, bugs. He had a. There was a maggot infestation in one of the jobs he did. But because he came up with this on his own and. And it was on his own terms. He set his own hours, and he even set the price. He has never been happier with that job.

Yeah.

I mean, he loved it.

He loved it. Now eventually, like, I think that he didn't.

Consistent, right? Yeah.

He didn't want to do the marketing all the time, which is what it took to keep that business going. So eventually he realized, I need something more steady.

I need a regular gig.

But we're so proud of that entrepreneurial spirit, and we've cheered that on. He's going to be a millionaire. Like, kind of.

Well, he's just so creative and stuff. Yeah.

He's my retirement plan. Like, go invent something big and then put me in a nice nursing home. Oh, my goodness, guys. Yeah. We could talk about this all day, but hopefully this gave you some ideas that you could talk about with your kids.

Can I say one more thing, please? I know we talked about older kids, but I wanted to say, we talked about the Bible verses with younger kids. I want to say this as well. Even before they can have a green light card or something like that. Do, like, the. You can look online, like on TikTok. There's great videos about this. You can look up articles about this. Pinterest would have a lot of good ideas. You can do a jar system with your kids when they're younger where you have one jars for savings, one jars for spending, one jars for tithing. And you can teach them about, you know, 10% to the savings, 10% to tithing, and then the 80% that you get to spend. And also it teaches them about giving. It teaches them about waiting to buy something they really want and how. Why we have a savings and why we tithe. And so if you look that up, there's all different ways you can do this. It could be a jar, it could be a sticker system, whatever. But I think that you can start that as young as, like, two. I mean, you really can.

And they understand and they're visual, and it helps them just, you know, visualize.

It's exciting for them.

Yeah, it's exciting. All right, guys, My favorite time of the episode we end always with a fascinating fact from Ashley and a dad joke from Dave. That's right.

Do you want me to go first? Why don't you go first?

All right. So I have this friend who's wife Ruth just left him, but now everybody's afraid of him.

Why?

Because now he's ruthless.

I like that one. That was a good one. He's ruthless.

Okay.

All right, so for today's fast or fascinating fact, this is from FactRetriver.com and it just talked about some fascinating facts about parenting. And I think this is really cool. So it said in Bulgaria, parents historically believed that the devil became jealous when a baby was praised too much. And you know how as parents we often give praise? So parents typically would spit on their babies and then said things such as they literally would say, may the chickens poop on you. So it's like an opposite, you know, opposite.

Try to trick the devil. Like, we don't want, we don't like.

But let me say this. When we went to Israel and Taiwan, our producer was there with us. Do you not remember Taliyah telling us about this? Remember when she said instead of saying it's going to be a great day, she was like, she made. She didn't actually spit, but she was like, no, it's going to be a terrible day. Like, it was like opposites. And she goes, that means it's going to be a great day. So I mean, even in Israel today they have this little opposite thing. It's like a superstitious, silly, you know, thing, and they know it's not doing anything. But I thought the spitting on a baby and then saying made chickens poop.

On you, the most interesting thing.

That is so random.

That is random.

All right.

That is really ruthless.

That is ruthless. That's true. All right, well, we so enjoyed this episode with you all. Please make sure that you are subscribing so that you can get every episode. Every week we do parenting Uncovered. And also, if you are liking this podcast and you feel like it's. It's helpful to you, please leave a five star review and tell, tell us why you like it because that is the best way to get the news out about this podcast, feel free to share it on your social media channels. We would be so grateful. And always, if you have a dad joke that you want Dave to share and also share your name or if you have a fascinating fact about parenting, please go to Dave and Ashley Willis on Instagram and I'm telling you, we will share it. And we'd be so glad to have that.

Yeah, write us. We always love hearing from you guys.

That's right. We'll see you next time. Bye, guys.