Teaching Financial Responsibility

When you were a kid, did you get an allowance? Was it based on completing chores? What did you spend your money on?

When I was little, I got an allowance. I don’t recall what I spent it on. I’m sure that the mall and movies were involved. By high school, I was spending it on long distance bills since I lived in a different state than where I went to high school. (Remember long distance bills? And being charged different rates for making calls during the day. Oh, the money I spent on the phone. I assure you, unlimited texting plans are much cheaper.)

Looking back, I was not financially responsible. I wasn’t saving. I wasn’t giving. I wasn’t thinking about my purchases as limited. I didn’t think of money as limited. This behavior stayed with me as an adult when I relied on credit cards to fund my financial irresponsibility.

Now, I do most of my shopping online and I am neurotic about my budget. I look at my budget spreadsheet several times a week to make sure I am on target. These tech tools have helped me become more financially responsible with age, but I wish I had started earlier and created better habits before my mid-thirties.

Right now, my stepkids vacillate on what is expensive. Some days, the $.99 app is something they are nervous asking for. Other days, $100 doesn’t seem expensive. In this tech landscape, how do we teach kids how to control their money? How much is a lot of money. How to control spending even if a particular purchase may not seem like a lot. (And I’m not a proponent of trying to teach them with cash in an envelope. Probably because I don’t use cash myself.)

How do we teach kids about using money in this tech-driven environment? Well, Virtual Piggy might just be the answer.

Virtual Piggy teaches kids how to save and give online. Because of the parental control options, kids can learn a ton about financial responsibility.

Here’s how it works:

• Parent goes to Virtual Piggy. Parent creates an account and adds credit card information for purchases, along with the shipping address.
• Parent then creates an account for the child(ren). My favorite part: each account parental controls where the parent can approve merchants, transaction limits and levels of transaction approvals.
• Because the child has a separate account, he/she doesn’t have any type of access to the credit card info or shipping preferences.
• The child can then shop at the Virtual Piggy merchants with only the username and password.

Parents can give the child a monthly allowance through Virtual Piggy. They can monitor every purchase and approve it. (Or just approve some – it depends on how you set it up.) You can also set up maximum limits – like how many times the child can buy from a certain merchant in a day.

Virtual Piggy uses the highest levels of security, so it is safe.

This empowers kids and teaches them about making purchases online. By knowing their limits, kids get a taste for budgeting and don’t engage in reckless spending.

And, in a feature that I adore, kids can also donate to charities with Virtual Piggy.

If you have kids and you are trying to teach them about financial responsibility and spending online, definitely check out Virtual Piggy. It’s a great solution to buying in the digital age.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post from Splash Creative Media on behalf of Virtual Piggy. All opinions are my own. 

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