A Little Life Lesson in Money

I won this cute little fella a couple of weeks ago on the Beyond the Baby Facebook page, thanks to Money Savvy Kids  It arrived in yesterday's mail and this morning was spent, setting it up and explaining how it all worked, it was a lot of fun having the 'money discussion' (I wish someone would have had the same discussion with me, when I was younger)

The money savvy pig has 4 slots unlike your traditional money box, which only has the one - Save, Spend, Donate and Invest.. So I went through and explained each of the areas to Mr 6 as best I could (I'm not too crash hot on the save and invest myself, so I hope I covered it well!)  I'm sure I covered the spend accurately though! No,seriously.. after explaining EACH area fully (using the handy little booklet that comes with the money box) we set up some of the goal stickers that came with the piggy.  He decided in his 'SAVE' slot, he would like to save for a new craft set, he decided $20 was his goal for his 'SPEND' slot and after getting $20 in there, he would like to take it to the store & buy something, his 'DONATE' slot he is going to use to put into various charity boxes at stores and the 'INVEST' slot is so far going to be used for an Ipod (which at age 6 is a big investment of course!).  The book encourages using the INVEST slot for future expenses such as cars or education, but when explained to Mr 6, he decided to Ipod would be an excellent investment for his 2012 future, perhaps we'll tackle University at 7.. hehehehe..

We then set about emptying his old money box, into the new. 

I empty out my purse at the end of each week and give all the silver coins (20c and under) to the kids equally in their money boxes, its amazing how quickly they tend to add up, so Mr 6's money box was full of mostly 5c and 10c coins and of course the odd $1 or $2 that he gets from odd jobs or change from his pocket money.  I got out my trusty purse and we 'exchanged' a lot of his 5c coins for larger currency such as 50c, $1.00 or $2.00 coins and I found this too was a great lesson in money - IE. "How many 5c coins do you think makes up 50c?" and  "If I give you $1.00, how many 10c coins will you need to give me?"  so on and so forth..  it was a lot of fun.

So there we have it, a new piggy bank.. I'm hopeful to swap over all the kids money boxes to this style over the upcoming months, I think it may help them to learn a valuable life lesson and will eliminate finding an empty money box (such as I did in Miss 9's room today) seems she may have made a withdrawal from it for the tuck shop quite regularly of late and decided to leave only 5c behind.. (oh well you cant blame a girl for taking after her Stepmother!) but perhaps the Money Savvy Piggy Bank may help her too (maybe I should grab one for myself while I'm at it).