Practically Fearless Living

No son, it's real money: Teaching teens about money

I'm not picking on boys here. I've got both flavors of teenagers, and nobody really gets it.

Public flogging time: I swear I thought I was teaching them to handle money. I swear I taught them about price comparisons, shopping for bargains, and how saving for things can be rewarding.

I did not teach him that a shirt wasn't a shirt unless it had that little guy on a pony stitched on the chest. I did not teach him that a vehicle must have a lift on it to run properly (I promise a future post for more about trucks, lifts, sound systems and other car-related must-haves.)

I've done some research, and I've put some of the links I've fund helpful at the bottom of this post. And now...the experiment begins. Each live-at-home teen will get a monthly allowance.

• For the driver: $80 for gas + $80 lunch money + $40 for mad money. That's $200, folks!
• For the one who can't drive: Same minus the gas money. Without a gas tank to fill, this teen gets $120.

The money is theirs to spend. If they go hungry so they can have more pony-guy shirts, fine. If they eat at Chic-fil-a at $7 a pop, it's their call. Lunch money is based on $4/day school lunch, which I've been assured in advance is very doable.

I can hear it coming from the one with the vehicle. "If I'm running your errands, I'm not using my gas." I'm good with that. I'll keep a tab of the requested trip miles. Then, at the end of the week, I'll pay up. I wonder if he'll keep track of his mileage? I'll bet he does if he disagrees with my total at the end of the first week.

There's a very good lesson there, too, isn't there? Never trust a grown up? Maybe, but I'm hoping the lesson will be "trust, then verify." 

My theory? Someone's going to start taking their lunch.

How do you help your teens learn to budget?

The Motley Fool guys have a great page with links to tons of sites aimed at teens and their parents. One of my offspring totally gets the concept of compounding. He has money in the bank. The other ones? Well, there's the hide-your-money offspring and the spend-it-now offspring. But I digress. Check out this site.

(no, not this guy)

The National Endowment for Financial Education has some good resources, too. Check it out here.

The big idea

I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a self-help guru. I'm just an approaching-50 woman with an idea.

In my family, people live to be old. I mean really old. One grandmother was weeks away from 103 when she died. Another was in her 80s. Both grandfathers? Into their 90s, thank you. I'm not bragging on my good gene pool. The point is this: If I'm true to my gene pool, I've got a lot of living left to do.

And that's where the idea for this blog started. With all that life ahead of me, how am I going to live it? A little therapy, a good church and a lot of navel contemplating have led me to this conclusion. I want to live it fearlessly. But that's where it gets tricky.

Most of use are never going to be totally fearless. Once we get to about age 12, we have a good bit of baggage that probably will keep us from the truly fearless state. So for the rest of us, there's Practically Fearless. What's that mean?

Well, here's what I want from practically fearless living:

• I'm not rich, so I've got to learn to handle the financial resources my husband and I have (I'm the money manager of the family) with skill and a little daring. I call this Fearless Financials.
• I want to let my three kids go into the world with confidence and with a sense of how I'm going to be a mom to three adults (one there already, two on the way). I've called this Fearless Family.
• I love to work. I want to work with purpose as long as I can. I'm going to put workplace issues under Fearless Future.
• I want to age gracefully, and not too quickly. I want to look as good as I can afford, and make the time to work at it. For lack of a better name, I'm going to call this Fearlessly Fabulous (Hmmm, I'll be working on that one.)
• I need to nurture friendships that will last through all this. I'm labeling this one Fearless Fun.
• I want to travel without being afraid to look like a tourist. Yep, this is more Fearless Fun.
• I want to cook, to eat and to play with my food. I call this Fearless Food.

Most of us don't have any idea how to move into the next phase of life. Lots of us, particularly women, I think, are intimidated, even frightened by what's ahead. Who wouldn't be? There are all sorts of things ahead that aren't, perhaps, the best parts.

I don't know how to do this either, but I know how I want to do it. I want to do it practically fearlessly: educated, unafraid of failure, filled with faith and surrounded by friends and family.

Join me in this journey towards fearless living.

I'll try to keep posts short and information packed, but I can't promise there won't be some navel gazing from time to time. Feel free to skip those entries!

And please, join in the conversation. Share your ideas, your favorite Web sites and blogs, books and tips from the school of life. This is about me, but it's really about all of us.