Make Saving Money Right Again!

Our Micro Money Message series delivers favorite family finance tips in a quick video format. Each one is designed to help you encourage your kids to adopt responsible and thoughtful money habits.

Here’s a listing of the first 35 episodes:

1. Take Your Time With Money Decisions — Help your kids avoid hasty money decisions like silly purchases or risky investments.
2. The Two-Way Power of Philanthropy — Challenge your kids to a random act of helpfulness this weekend.
3. Luck And Work Go Hand In Hand — Show kids the relationship between luck and work.
4. Know Your Money Leaks — Teach kids to mind their little money leaks so they can keep their financial boats afloat.
5. Tell Your Dollars Where To Go — Show kids how to tell their dollars where to go rather than asking where they went.
6. Own The Whole Market — Picking individual stocks is like finding needles in a haystack. Instead, follow this simple recipe for getting your teens in the investing hunt.
7. Use a Hybrid Card Strategy — Credit cards build a credit history, but they don’t prevent debt. Prepaid cards prevent debt, but they don’t build a credit history. So which one is best for your older teen?
8. Spark The Independence Flame — A simple recipe for sparking the flame of financial independence within your child.
9. Let Kids Choose The Spend-Save-Give Allocation — How to help your kids strike the right financial balance.
10. Prompt the Philanthropy Discussion With Great Quotes — Make philanthropy a regular part of your kid’s vocabulary and give that Giving Jar a whole new meaning.
11. Convert Prices To Work Units to Teach Kids The Value Of A Dollar — A simple way to make kids appreciate the value of a dollar.
12. Use The Rule Of 72 To Turn A $20 Birthday Check Into $1,280 — The Rule of 72 is a great way to teach your kids what money invested today could be worth in the future.
13. Play The Sweep-To-Savings Game With Your Teen — An easy way to gamify frugal spending habits with your teen.
14. Reward Your Kids With Mom/Dad Dollars — Paying for chores can be an expensive and questionable proposition — unless, of course, you’re printing your own money. Here’s how and why to do just that.
15. Give Your Teen Cash Back Rewards For NOT Spending — What’s in your teen’s wallet? Here’s how to deliver a parent-financed cash-back bonus card that rewards your teen for NOT spending.
16. Run A Family Banking System With Prepaid Cards — Prepaid cards are excellent financial training wheels for your kids. Here’s how to set up a family banking system with prepaid cards that teaches your kids good money habits without the risk, hassle, or hidden fees of credit cards and bank debit cards.
17. Put Some Pain In Your Kid’s Cashless Payment — Here’s how to put a little “pain” in your teen’s cashless transactions to foster cash-like spending habits. No pain, no restrain.
18. Add An Emergency Fund To Your Kid’s Money Bucket List — Why wait until your kids leave the nest to teach them how to take the first baby step out of financial distress? How to introduce your kids to emergency funds now.
19. Teach Kids A Simple Secure PIN Strategy — Kids struggle with proper PIN management. Here’s a simple recipe you can teach them to create and remember secure PINs.
20. Use Reimbursements To Teach Teens The Value Of A Dollar — Make teens active participants in the everyday expenses you’re picking up. That way, they’ll know — and appreciate — the real value of a dollar when the day comes for everything to be on their nickel.
21. Make Kids Journal Their Money Requests — Here’s another way (aside from a budget-based allowance) to put the brakes on impulsive extra money requests from your kids.
22. Tell Teens To Take More Risk — There’s one area where teens need to pump up the risk if they’d like to enjoy a healthy future: investing. This video gives parents a recipe for getting them started. It’s called the Family 401(k).
23. Make #GivingTuesday Your Kid’s Annual Habit — Here’s a recipe for instilling a philanthropic habit in your kids by anchoring it to the annual event known as #GivingTuesday.
24. Turn Why Into How When Kids Whine About Money — How to turn whining into problem solving when your kids want to buy something.
25. Hold Teens Accountable For Big Fines With A Parent Payment Plan — When teens incur bigger fines than their accounts can handle, parents often pick up the tab. Here’s a better solution.
26. Nudge Your Kid’s Charitable Impulses With Giving Data — How much are your kids allocating to charitable giving? This data might be just the nudge your kids need to up their charitable games in the new year.
27. 6 Reasons To Stop Giving Cash To Your Teens — Are you still handing cash over to your teens? Here are 6 reasons to replace the dollars with a card. Get clean, safe, transmittable, tracked, online, and real with a prepaid card instead.
28. Make Kids Pay The Sales Tax — Kids often don’t have a clue about how much things cost or that sales tax even exists. Here&rsquos a clever and affordable way to make your kids mindful of both.
29. Let Kids Gift Service Bucks Instead Of Stuff — If you want your kids to be thoughtful gift givers, but you don’t need any more stuff, here’s a solution.
30. Set Up A Smart Competition To Make Investing Lessons Fun — Betting on a favorite stock is fun but stupid. Buying an index fund is smart but boring. So how do you make smart investing lessons fun for kids? Here’s one way.
31. Try A Use-It-Or-Lose-It Allowance For Obsessive Young Savers — Some kids have a spending problem. They don’t spend at all. Here’s how you can help a young obsessive saver loosen up the purse strings a bit and enjoy money instead of just hoarding it.
32. Bill Kids Weekly For Their Share Of The Best Deal — Here’s how you can pay for your kids’ up-front or family subscription plan to get the best deal while still holding them accountable for their fair share.
33. Offer Kids A Savings Match (With Strings Attached) — Encourage your kid to save by offering a matching contribution, but attach some strings to send the right message.
34. Reward Your Kid With A Spot Bonus Today — A spot bonus is a great way to brighten a kid’s day. Here’s what other parents are doing.
35. Encourage Kids To Be Name-Callers When Saving — Teach your kids that name-calling is a bad habit, except when it comes to saving money. Here’s why.

Episode 36, Make Saving Money Right Again, just went live. Check it out.

Here’s the transcript:

Hey, Bill here. As always, thank you for the nice mentions on social media.

A recent survey of 7,000 American adults found that 34% had zero dollars in a savings account.

And, a whopping 69% had squirreled away less than $1,000 in savings. That’s worse than 62% the year before. American adults are trending in the wrong direction on savings.

It made me wonder how our kids are doing.

So, I ran some numbers on FamZoo.com.

Here’s what I found: in a sampling of 6,515 kids, 44.3% had zero dollars tucked away in a separate FamZoo.com savings account. That’s about 10% worse than the adult survey stat.

We can do better.

If you need some ideas, stop by FamilyFinanceFavs.com. You’ll find tons of my favorite savings tips for kids of all ages.

You know, William Shatner has one of my favorite savings quotes: “If saving money is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”

But, hey, let’s make it easy on our kids. Let’s make saving money right again. Then, we can reverse the savings trend for the next generation.

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Want to turn these tips into action? Check out FamZoo.com.