Kid Ledger – Episode 637

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. We’re going to be talking about prosperity parents. We’re going to be talking about some new features and additions in the community and things that will help you parents out. Kim, this stems from a lot of recent, we’ll call it incredible activity that’s been happening. So fill us in and then I’m going to pepper you with some questions. Awesome. Well, this whole prosperity parents space for the last couple of years has really just been my passion project and I’ve been really wanting to help young families more, it’s a community that I really love. My adult children are in that quote young family space and it’s just a

[00:47] really special group of people that are very near and dear to my heart. And I really want to work with them in the next 30 years. So as I’ve navigated the space around prosperity parents and all of the supporting memberships and clubs and books and data and podcasts and apps and games and YouTube channels to curate for our clientele and the new young families that I want to help a space where parents can go to help their children with financial competency. And we’ve talked about this before, but I’m still excited to give everybody an update on it. And what’s so cool about it is that if you don’t have young children yourself, you probably have young grandchildren, or if you don’t have any of that, you might be a Sunday school teacher, or you might be

[01:42] involved in boys and girls club, or you might just have a neighbor kid. Right? I mean, there are families that help other families. Sometimes it’s just for a year or two, just because of the proximity of the actual physical humans. And the bottom line is we all have children in our lives in some format. And if we don’t, this is the really fun thing. The adults that have gone through the prosperity parents material have said, oh my gosh, I learned so much myself. So that’s what’s fun about the work that we’re doing. And I can’t wait to just walk you through the resources and the good that’s occurring. And everybody can be on high alert because in the next 30 days, there will be some massive upgrades.

[02:27] Ooh, I love it. Okay. So we want to get through some of the new resources that are available. I think it helps to set the foundation of the community. And for us, you know, like, you know, having these conversations and podcasting and doing this. One realization that I’ve seen is that communities online have become stronger, maybe in some areas they’re smaller, but they’re stronger because it’s now, instead of saying, oh, you fit in either bucket A or bucket B, there’s now like buckets A through Z and it’s the tighter group. And that’s what you’ve done here. You’ve said, okay, well, we help value oriented families that are looking for legacy versus saying, oh, we just help kids save money. Big difference between the two.

[03:22] So talk about those new resources and everything. Absolutely. Well, let’s start with one that you helped create. So I’ll back up one more step. The prosperity parents space is curating materials, community, wisdom and results. And one of those things that you helped create is called kid ledger. K I D L E D G E R. And in time that will be listed featured really on the prosperity parents homepage because of what it does. So I’ll give my benefit and then maybe if you want, you can back up and tell a little bit more about the behind the scenes and we’ll go fast so that this is an overview. And then maybe in future podcasts, we’ll dive in a little bit deeper. So I was actually just in an event, the CPAs on stage talked about if

[04:17] you have a business, even if it’s a solopreneur, but ideally it’s LLC or something, and most people have at least an LLC these days, pay your kids yet you absolutely positively must do it properly. And as we know with things in the IRS is space, if there’s a $15,000 figure that we can move money from our tax bracket to our kids tax bracket, we absolutely positively must do it right. And that’s what kid ledger does. That’s right. So I love how you teed that up. So here’s the origin story. You and I have these conversations about finance all the time, and it’s beyond just finance dollar figures. It is, and it really goes back to the time that our families have spent together on your property. Some, this sounds really strange.

[05:13] Some of my greatest memories that I have with Kim are when I’ve got rubber boots on and I am shoveling manure and I’m serious. I am legit serious. That’s actually a stronger memory than sitting by the pool. And the reason why is because there’s something special that happens with hard work. You bond with the person, you get to enjoy it. You get to laugh when you’re doing hard work and that’s what brings families together. So you and I have had these conversations and it was my daughter Eliana, she’s now 13. So when she was maybe 12, 13, she’s been just asking, I’m not going to use the word pestering, but asking for additional jobs saying, dad, what else can I do to earn money? And she’s done little things and that’s how KidLedger started.

[06:13] So Kim, you mentioned the importance of tracking and keeping things organized. I wasn’t at that recent conference, bring us in. And then of what they were saying about that, and then I’ll tackle the KidLedger and the logistics. Sure. So there were actually two different CPA presentations from two different firms about the value of the various things that a business owner can do. So again, if you own an LLC, even if it’s just for a tiny little piece of real estate or something to make that legit entrepreneurial space. And one of the things that they covered in depth, which I did with my young children was to pay them for modeling, like modeling a picture of a child, sometimes just sitting like models do, right?

[07:05] Sometimes actually doing things. And they said, you can absolutely pay your kids to be a model as long as you, and of course they did use them and actually the girl used nieces and nephews, as long as you use them in your slides for presentation, as long as you document it properly, as long as you have all of the steps laid out with the physical documentation and, you know, it can be online, of course, but where the steps are all complete. And this is a CPA from the front of the room. And I was so grateful because it’s something that I had done. I did it properly back in the day, but it was hard. We didn’t have some of the resources that are available today. So one of those resources is a modeling agreement.

[07:52] And as you know, the importance of putting the language in that the IRS is looking for with the specificity of what that child is doing. And we’re talking a one and a two-year-old, right? When the kids, when my kids were one and two, we did this. And so you have fast forward today, created a space, not just for modeling, but for all the types of things that the kids would do. And if I remember correctly, you’ve even created it in such a way that if somebody tries to type something in, it’s just too far out of the ballpark. The system will say, hold on, let’s rework that. Let’s rethink that, or maybe let’s not do it at all because we want to do things properly. The IRS code, Tom Wheelwright says this all the time, is

[08:40] nothing more than a rule book. Just follow the rules and you can win. Yep, absolutely. So the foundation of where we’re looking at with KidLedger and the things that we did is that there are no tax loopholes. That’s negative language. There’s no loopholes. All it is just understanding the rules, the rule book, and then following with the rule book. It’s as simple as that. So what we did in KidLedger is we wanted to make it easy for parents to get their kids doing work and easy for them to track it and easy to prove it. And so the way that works is you go through and it could be modeling. It could be social media. It could be sweeping the shop. It doesn’t matter. And then we have an AI built.

[09:32] So you can type in few words and explain what it is. And then the AI will come back and say, sounds like this is your task and it gives it a good IRS friendly description. It estimates how long that task may take, what the hourly pay or the pay for that task should be. And then Kim, as you mentioned earlier, it does the whole, Hey, this is a legitimate thing, or this is not. So if the task is, I’m going to have my kid find out what’s the best candy bar out there and eat candy bars, probably not. But if the task is greet customers at the store, write thank you cards, you know, film, social media videos, that’s great. And that’s what they should be doing. So Kim, when you have helped your kids go through this process, the

[10:24] difficulty for some parents is to figure out what jobs they can do. The difficulty for some parents is to track and make sure they’re compliant and then the difficulty is to motivate the kids. How did you do that with yours? And how are you seeing the challenge of this happening and being successful now? Well, it is imperative to help your children connect work to the value of a dollar. Otherwise, as they progress into adulthood, they don’t have any understanding of this costs $10 and this costs $200. It’s just numbers to them. And so in our family’s life, it has always been connected to a farm. And I will readily admit that makes it way easier. Yet you gave some fabulous examples of business related things that could be

[11:17] done and there are so many businesses today that are virtual and work out of homes and have amazing opportunities to not only serve, but to employ children to make that service a family event, and it truly is endless. I mean, if you can create a business and think about it, you can employ children. There, there is absolutely a way to do it, but I would go so far as thinking about anything that gets done on a farm, because even if you don’t have an actual farm, a lot of the things can be applied and that includes a lot of yard care, for example, a lot of cleaning that type of thing. So you may not have alpacas to pick up after, but you’ve got something that can be done that is business oriented.

[12:05] And oh my gosh, how helpful it is that KidLedger can help you narrow it down or eliminate it. And you just keep coming up with ideas. Some of those will stick. Yes. So good. So I’ll leave with a couple of examples of how we are using it in house with our family, not only am, you know, like either technical coder and creator, but like user. So my son has a junk removal business. He’s 17. It’s a legit business. He works with property managers. He’s running Google ads, doing all of this. Now, my daughter on some of the jobs, she’ll go with my son. We’re homeschool family. So we have some of that flexibility, but she wanted to be able to earn money in other areas. So her task is to write thank you notes to all the customers.

[12:58] And then she has a Ziploc bag where she puts dog treats in there with the business card and the thank you note. She tracks that and mentions it and shows proof inside of KidLedger. Speaking of proof, you can take a picture of the work done. Meaning if you swept up the shop, take a picture of the clean shop. And then now you have something where they’re engaged, self-managed. The parent has to approve it. So you’re not going to, again, say, tell me what’s the best candy bar or ice cream. Like it’s a real job and everyone feels empowered. Kids make money and it just keeps the world like building these great little humans. So I appreciate you letting me have the space to share and then contribute to the prosperity community.

[13:47] There is a special for the prosperity community. So, and on the website, we’ll either have kidledger.com forward slash prosperity or the keyword, meaning where it’s mentioned, coupon, all of that will be prosperity, special things just for this community. Thank you. What a joy to be able to offer that to our families, to get amazing results, not only with themselves and their tax environment, but with those very special children or grandchildren that we’re all seeking to raise into financially competent adults. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit ProsperityThinkers.com