Try This Trick on Your Kids

Want your kids to be better with money? Does it pain you to see how much candy they get on Halloween? Try this trick. Buy their candy from them.

What you do is tell your kids you'll give them $.25 for each piece of candy they get for Halloween. Then they can buy the candy back from you as they want it. Any money they don't spend on buying back their candy, they get to keep.

Kids will usually buy back the candy they like most, first. So, once the good stuff is gone you can put the rest of the candy on sale. For example, the price on leftover stuff might drop to 2 for $.25 or 3 for $.25.

You may want to put rules into place ahead of time, such as: only $1.00 can be spent daily.

The purpose of the trick is to help kids exercise some restraint, learn a little economics and understand the value of money.

Teach Your Kids How Not to be Phished

My son asked me if we switched credit unions. I told him that we hadn't and that was the end of the conversation. A few days later he asked what a "Sooper Credit Union Alert" was, that prompted me to ask him where he heard of such a thing. Then he showed me the text you see in the picture.

Fortunately he has heard me speak about Phishing Scams on more than one occasion, so he didn't follow the instructions on the message. But he also stewed on this for sometime, never asking me directly and waiting to show me the message.

Our kids are equally vulnerable to scams. Phishers don't know or care who they send their bait. And because kids want to be independent, or may be insecure about their ability to handle financial situations they are susceptible to scams. Kids today have a great deal of valuable information such as PINs, passwords, and account numbers.

Teach your kids how to safely handle personal information and to be suspicious whenever they are asked to give it out. Also remember that even though your child may seem savvy about finances and technology they are still kids and they've still learning. Adults fall for scams every day, kids can too.