In this two-part interview, Good Morning Arizona anchor Kaley O’Kelley talks with Steve, Annette, Abbey and Joe Economides about how to be a MoneySmart Family.
Plus, at the bottom of the page, we’ve also included a list of things parents should never pay for.
Part 1 covers College Expenses
How to go to college debt free.
Where to look for scholarships.
How to find huge discounts on textbooks.
Part 2 covers how to start training kids to manage money.
How young to start
How to set up a system that is better than an allowance.
What an 18-year-old money-smart kid looks like.
Parents are going broke raising their kids
PHOENIX — The “experts” at the USDA in their 2010 report “Expenditures on Children and Families” say that we should expect to spend about $261,000 to raise each child from birth through age seventeen ($14,500 per year). Do you think this is accurate? We don’t! In 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median annual household income fell to $49,777. Meaning that it could take more than five years and three months of your entire gross household income to get Junior through the formative years and ready for college.
Just calculate with us for a minute. If you’re an average family with 1.8 children (according to USDA figures, this alone should cost you $26,100 per year), living in an average city, spending an average amount on food ($200 per month per person x 12 months = $9,120 per year) with an average yearly household income ($50,000 per year—about $40,000 after taxes), you’d be left with $4,700 a year ($392 per month) to spend on cars, clothes, housing, debt, recreation, gifts, utilities, healthcare, cell phones, cable TV, medical bills, dental bills, and chewing gum. Something simply doesn’t add up!
If you’re going to survive financially and have any money left to retire on, you’re going to have to draw a line in the sand with what you’re willing to spend on your kids.
Many parents think that they have to provide their kids with the best things in life. But we’ve discovered that giving our kids the best things, often means that they will expect us to continue to do that . . . indefinitely. But teaching them to pay their own way, starting with smaller expenses from the youngest ages, will produce an abundance of benefits as they exercise their own mental and financial assets to resolve their wants and desires.
At the very least, parents ought to allow their children the privilege of sharing some of the cost of the things they want. But the truth is, the more our kids invest in their own financial decisions, the more they’ll value and care for what they buy. When parents pay for their kids wants and desires, they’re actually stealing valuable financial growth opportunities from them. While parents may bristle at some of our suggestions, here are 10 things they should never pay for!
- Designer apparel
- Video gaming systems
- Mall spending money
- Designer sunglasses
- Good grades
- Class rings
- Auto Insurance
- Car of their own
- Cell phones and cell service
- Cosmetic surgery (with rare exceptions)
Oh, and a couple more things parents simply should never pay for.
- Tanning Salons
- Hair Coloring
You’ll never regret allowing your kids to stand on their own two feet financially. It pays great dividends to them and protects your dividends for retirement.
It’s never too early, too late, or too hard to start teaching and learning financial responsibility.
Adapted from The MoneySmart Family System
America’s Cheapest Family’s MoneySmart College Text Book Fact Sheet
The average college student (or his parents) will spend between $500 and $900 per semester for books. By doing a little sleuthing, we’ve found savings as great as 87 percent on books our kids have needed.
Here are loads of ways to save thousands of dollars on textbooks during your college career.
1) Buy Used from your College Bookstore and save about 25 percent
2) Buy used from another student who just took the class — save 50 percent or more
3) Buy used on the Web — we’ve saved up to 87 percent
- CollegeBooksDirect.com 25% – 40%
- Ebay.com We’ve saved between 30% and 90% on textbooks for our kids
- Amazon.com We’ve found great deals on textbooks here too!
- CheapestTextBooks.com This site searches all of the other sites and helps you find the best deals around. It’s great to get an idea of where the best prices are.
- Chegg.com If you don’t plan on keeping your textbooks for a particular class, you can rent them for about 1/3 the cost of buying them
- Amazon.co.uk—Believe it or not, purchasing hard to find textbooks from Amazon’s site in the United Kingdom can save you some dough (even with the cost of international shipping included).
- International Editions – Search for Global or International editions of textbooks. They are usually paperback and ship from another country, but arrive quickly and save 50 to 75 percent.
College scholarship websites
fafsa.ed.gov
cappex.com
fastweb.com
scholarships.com
scholarshipdetective.com
Chegg.com
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