Share, Save, Spend – Teaching Kids About Money

Remember when I talked a little about financial responsibility for children? Today I’m sharing with you the way we teach the B girls how to be responsible with the money that they earn and are given.

Check out my video explaining the different ways our girls see money:

Many families also have a similar model for their children and the ways they can Share, Save, and Spend. Often times I know I will pay for my items with my debit card, and even though it’s not spending what I don’t have, my girls aren’t able to learn directly as I shop. This method is a great alternative to imitation.

This is also where the website VirtualPiggy.com comes in handy for those children who are receiving a regular{ish} allowance, and who are online more often than my two little ones.

What’s great about VirtualPiggy.com is that it gives parents full control of their child’s account.

• You can set monthly allowance amounts, savings targets and charity goals.
• You also have the option to require approval on every purchase your child makes, or just some of them.
• You can set a maximum limit per transaction, per day or per week, or restrict which merchants your child is able to shop at.

As you can see, it’s a pretty easy program to set up and change and also offers your family security from questionable websites and security concerns.

For parents: Your credit card information is kept under our PCI-DSS Level 1 Certified security, the highest level available. Because this information is stored under your parent account, your child never has access to it.

For children: Because the child only needs their Virtual Piggy their username and password to checkout, they never use your credit card, or provide personal information like their name, age, birthdate, contact information or home address. Virtual Piggy is also a certified licensee of the TRUSTe® Children’s Privacy Program, which has been approved by the Federal Trade Commission as an authorized safe harbor under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule.

My only wish/hope is that VirtualPiggy offers options on donating to charities or maybe even setting aside money for churches and charities.

Although my girls are young, I’ve definitely been checking out VirtualPiggy.com for when they get a little older. I also encourage you to check it out if you have children ages 5 and up.

Find them at www.virtualpiggy.com. We can also be reached at www.facebook.com/virtualpiggy and www.twitter.com/followpiggy.