Teaching Kids About Money, Pt. 2

Principle #2:  Patience

Image from rapturebooks.co.uk

This was my husband's section...

Too many of our youth get into financial difficulty because they never learned proper principles of financial common sense at home. Teach your children while they are young. Teach them that they cannot have something merely because they want it. Teach them the principles of hard work, frugality, and saving.

If you don’t consider yourself informed well enough to teach them, all the more reason for you to begin learning. Abundant resources are available—from classes, to books, to other resources.

There are those among us who have been blessed abundantly with enough and to spare. Our Heavenly Father expects that we do more with our riches than build larger barns to hold them. Will you consider what more you can do to build the kingdom of God? Will you consider what more you can do to bless the lives of others and bring light and hope into their lives?

 - - LDS General Conference, April 2004, Saturday Afternoon,  Joseph B. Wirthlin

In the class my husband asked the women to contemplate the following questions:

• List two poor financial habits that you observed in your parents?
• Why do you think they had them?
• What are two financial habits that you want to change before you pass them on to your children?

We believe that the most important way to teach this principle (and possibly the others) is by living the principle of patience ourselves.  If you wait long enough, you can buy anything for almost nothing.  Many of us feel this rushed "need to buy," rather than waiting for the opportune moment.

Likewise, around the same time, he wanted one of those squishy pillows (the ones with tiny balls of something inside??).  Anyway, he saw them on sale at Fred Meyer for about $10 or something.  Again, he walked in the store and came out without a pillow.  Within the next two or three weeks he found a pillow at a garage sale for 50 cents.  Two weeks after that he sold the pillow to his sister for a dollar or something. 

The point?  He waiting and eventually found what he was looking for. 

There have been countless times I have bought things at a store only to find it later at a yard sale or thrift store for half the price.  Patience!