Melissa over at Master Your Card wrote about preparing our children financially now so that they can avoid all the pitfalls that clever marketers devise to get them to part with their money in an article entitled, Arm your Children with Financial Knowledge | Master Your Card.
Kids are faced with buying decisions at the mall, cell phones, text messages, clothes, sporting goods, and all the stuff their peers want, and buy. Peer pressure is an amazing phenomenon that afflicts kids more than any other demographic and it plays right into companies' sales strategies.
Melissa points out that "financial knowledge early equals more financial security in the future" and I couldn't agree more. The converse is certainly clear: financial ignorance leads to less financial security, for it is knowledge that is power, and nowhere is that axiom more clear than in terms of personal finance. We've all made mistakes and wished "we knew then what we know now." Unfortunately, most of us didn't get personal finance education in school or at home.
It's a shame, too, because many of life's hurdles could be easier to clear if we didn't have to worry about the debt we accumulated because we didn't know any better or thought we had plenty of time to correct. Often, time is on the side of our creditors and the "system" seems to be slanted in favor of credit card companies, banks, and other financial institutions.
Learning about the pitfalls of poor financial decisions as well as getting a solid grasp of prudent financial planning techniques can empower our children to do better than their parents, which is what any good parent wants for her children.
Great post, Melissa. I encourage you to read more from the Master Your Card site. There are high-quality posts there that run the gamut of personal finance topics.
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