Saving Cents Makes Sense
The Issue: Teaching financial literacy need not be a difficult task. A young boy collects pennies around the house, daily. At the end of the month, he has money for incidental needs.
A young mother related a story of one of his sons who walks around the house collecting pennies. He knows that although he’s only collecting pennies, he would ask his siblings as to who owns them. When nobody claims ownership, he’d collect and put them in a jar.
In trips with his parents to stores, he’d walk around to see the cost of items he needs. He writes them down, religiously. He even compares prices of the same items with other stores. He goes home and compares the cost of his needs versus prices he just took down.
The kid was never in a hurry to spend. He learned to save pennies and builds it up until he has about $10 in his make-shift kitty. Each time he decides to spend, he checks the status of his notebooks, length of his pencils and erasers and other school needs.
He maps out how many clean pages he uses daily on an average. He’d mark his little calendar to plot average use of a new pencil. Hence, he never bothers his parents for little things he needs for he has learned how to save for them.
By saving pennies thrown around the house by his siblings, he has learned the essence of saving money and the opportunity to spend them responsibly. A grammar school pupil, he has learned to embrace responsibility by saving for incidental needs.
Surprisingly, even mom and dad would borrow his $10 to buy gasoline for the family car or cover a sibling’s expense scheduled for a class excursion. He’d humbly extend a hand but charges a tiny interest ($.50) for the loan.
Imagine if most our children follow the example of this young grammar school student. They need ask for lunch money from mom and dad for they too would have learned that saving cents makes sense. Get the kids to learn savings. It’s a good approach too to building responsible young citizens.
