Back to School Routines – Episode 580

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. We’re gonna be talking about back to school routines, and we’re thrilled to be able to have this as a video podcast for any of you listeners that are just listening to audio. Make sure you jump over and subscribe to the YouTube channel because there’s some special clips on there and other videos that’ll be helpful for you. So, Kim, you look at back to school from the lens of you being a child with teacher parents and now as a community leader helping parents with their kids, so we’re interested to hear both sides. Oh, so fun. And it’s funny that you almost said homeschool because while we were not homeschooled, me and my sister, because we had teachers as parents,

[00:55] holy cow, did we get some extra? And that was wonderful. Not sure I thought so at the time. Nevertheless, it’s such a fun time. It really energizes everybody. Even if you don’t have children or you are just out of the back to school space, September is just a joyful re-energizing of activities and newness and people get down to business again and the schools obviously support that, which is fabulous and vice versa, which is even better. So there are definitely some things that I would love to share and it’s funny that you brought up the YouTube channel and school because the very first YouTube video that I posted eons ago is me speaking at my alma mater and it’s maybe a 20 minute talk and I’ve left it on there

[01:45] because it’s a valuable piece of information. There’s a lot of my background that I share and there’s just some fun things. So extra credit to the listener that goes all the way to the back of the YouTube channel and finds that one. Well, you know, it’s cool one that you’ve left the library up there because that is a bookmark to say, this is where I started and so many people don’t do that. So where do we get started with these back to school routines? Well, there’s three E’s. So the letter E like elephant that I wanna bring up that are part of our new prosperity parents material and while I have always been very honored to help a very wide range of people, just the nature of my practice, it’s nationwide, it’s virtual

[02:36] so I can literally help anybody and truly there’s very few circumstances other than the ultra, ultra wealthy, maybe 20 million and above or something but other than that, there’s very few circumstances of people’s personal finances that I have not seen and so I am honored to be able to help everybody and I will admit that my favorite group of people to help right now are young families that are dealing with children that are getting into school, maybe they’re even in middle school or high school. Financial literacy is such an over talked about concept and truly that’s wonderful and it’s really financial competency that we should be seeking and when you think about it, we’re not raising children,

[03:27] we’re raising young adults and so these young families that are out there and they’re often both working or maybe one is at home because they’re still young children at home or it’s their choice or maybe they’re homeschooling, there’s a wide variety there and our prosperity parents material can really drill down to some very practical applications of this thing called financial literacy that we really want to be about financial competency and I love practical applications, it really bugs me when stuff is theoretical. So the age old question of a kid like, where am I gonna use this, like what is this for? I’m in my English class, I’m dividing up sentences and in my math class, I’m doing whatever it is

[04:18] and I don’t even know why I would ever use that, that’s sad. So the three E’s that can be very practically applied and are great to build a routine around back to school habits are first, expectations, second, expenses and third, extra pay. So I’m gonna go on record and you and I have talked about this about not paying kids allowances. Allowance frankly is socialism, it is giving money for doing nothing and there has been time in my life, in fact you can probably find a podcast way, way back in our history where you and I talked about allowances because I didn’t know what else to do, now I do. So under the prosperity parents umbrella, the expectations must happen first and those are making your bed possibly

[05:17] like you choose your own expectations, I’m just gonna give you some ideas, maybe it’s memorizing some spiritual work like if you’re a family that enjoys scripture or something else that is spiritual or inspirational in the morning, to get mindset right, there’s something physical typically so it could be do 10 pushups, do 20 sit ups, whatever the thing is that your family wants to focus on, there’s often something food related so these are expectations that the child is going to do because they live in your home, let’s not let our five year old run the household, they live in your home, you’re providing them a home and a house and so whatever your family, I would pick four or five, for older children there can be more,

[06:06] expectations that you have and make sure that those are handled at a minimum, maybe it’s emptying the dishwasher, whatever it is and there can be some in the morning, some in the evening of course, then the second one is expenses and it is uber important that you start to help children see what costs what, in other words this is how much dinner is, this is how much groceries are, this is how much this toy is and start to let them take on some expenses so for example they may be going to a birthday party, let them purchase the gift, I promise you it will transform that party, like the whole party, the kid that brings the gift that they bought because kids are gonna have some money, either they got some money from their own birthday

[06:58] or maybe there has been a past of allowance paying or there has been some other thing and maybe to start out you need to go to step three which we’ll get to in a minute but nevertheless they’re probably gonna have some money so when they use their own money to purchase the gift and they take that gift to the birthday party, they handle it so differently, the recipient handles it so differently, it literally transforms the whole party. There’s a lot of parties these days they don’t even open the gifts, they’re just off to do their jumping thing or whatever it is that they’re gonna do and so the kid that brings a gift that they have purchased, the giver and the recipient gets a lot of value at it

[07:35] and so does everybody else and then the third is extra pay. So not for doing the expectations but for doing something extra. Well, what does that look like? It’s very age-specific and it could be as simple as, hey, I noticed that all of the recycling boxes need to be flattened. If I flatten them all, can I earn an extra two, three, four, five dollars? Extra pay. Is there a dog mess that needs to get cleaned up? Is there a chewy box that needs to get unpacked and put away? And the kids start to brainstorm around this and they’re gonna pick various things that are age-appropriate. You may need to train them on how to do the thing that you’re going to provide extra pay for and again, it’s age-appropriate,

[08:25] so it might be five dollars, might be 20 dollars, might be one dollar, might be a quarter, like for a really young child. Maybe they put the silverware away as an expectation but then for the expenses, maybe they do, again, something age-appropriate. They scrub a pot that was difficult at dinner time and couldn’t go in the dishwasher. Just something like that and they get a quarter so that they start to learn this space of extra pay and then you can work it backwards, right? Because then they have extra money to buy the birthday gift and they’re clear on the difference between expectations, expenses, so they’re going to start to take on some of their own expenses and extra pay and that over time will shift

[09:13] so that they are actually taking on more and more of their expenses because they’re taking on more and more extra pay and that’s all in the home yet for the older children, once they’ve understood that, it can get out into the community and so they might see a neighbor’s driveway that needs to get cleaned and they might clean it just as volunteer but they might also get extra money for it. There might be extra things out in the community. I know a whole family that cleaned the town square like they had gotten garbage and some other things and they went and cleaned the town square as a volunteer and then another area of the town needed the same thing and the town offered to pay the family to do it

[10:01] so there’s a lot of opportunity out there for extra pay and those will establish some amazing back to school habits. I love it, those are great. There’s a couple pieces that I want to touch on and I’m not going to go in order. I’m going to start with extra pay because we’ve got what can be a potential problem and I’ve seen this happen as I’ve spoken with other parents which is on the extra pay, paying your kids too much. So we have two types of payment and so I want to get some insight here which is we have the payment which we could calibrate down to an hourly, say this is probably a job that’s worth $15 an hour and so we’d say, okay, it would be 15 bucks or let’s say it’s a half an hour job

[10:51] so maybe worth seven, eight dollars, okay? But then we also want to be training and helping our kids to do jobs where the input and the output are not equal meaning if you do a sales job, the time that you put in versus your pay isn’t equal as a type of person working at a retail store. So how do you address those? It’s a great question and I’m not sure I have a really good answer. It’s something that is super valuable and I’m really glad you’ve brought it up because without a doubt we want to train our children to be entrepreneurial thinkers. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily going to go own a business or do a sales job as you’ve brought up yet the person that thinks entrepreneurially

[11:43] and this has been a message of prosperity thinkers forever and ever is going to look at things differently. They’re going to want to give first. They’re going to offer to help and so I think a discussion can ensue because typically in this space you’re dealing with the older set of children maybe and again age is so relative because you might have a kid that’s in sixth grade that’s ready for this conversation. Somebody else has a 15 year old that’s not even ready for this conversation but there is so much information out there now that can help us. For example, you could go on Glassdoor or what have you and take a look at some of the obligations that their friends’ parents pursue in the form of opportunities.

[12:33] Jobs, work is both an obligation and an opportunity and so take a look at what some of those things are there and start to learn what appropriate compensation is and how people get paid that are not on hourly and that are more project based or job specific and then also you have sites like Fiverr today that are so instructive in paying by the piece essentially or paying by the project which are just other ways to calculate the value and then I think also can come into the discussion, well, why doesn’t athlete get paid? They have an extreme amount of money I’m talking to a professional level athlete that they do and your kids are gonna start to hear about this and know about this so a discussion needs to happen about that

[13:27] which is really tricky in some families. If your family has a history of being employee based and hourly paid and then you’re looking at some of these extreme things, you want to just be frank with your children and let the discussion happen as a learning space for all people and really let the kids weigh in with their opinion as well. I’m guessing you’ve got some additional answers that would help share it. Yeah, so for us, I’ve found the first stepping stone that we use is when we’ll attach an estimate to a project. So for example, a wood pile has to get stacked or chopped and so I’ll look at the wood pile and I may have an idea of how long it takes. Let’s say 10 hours. So I’ll look at that and say,

[14:18] okay, that’s probably a 10 hour project at we’ll say this is a $10 an hour job that’s a hundred bucks. My kids, I’ll say, all right, well, here’s the job. This is outside of chores, so this is separate. How much do you guys want from it? And it typically will go where they either really underestimate it. They’ll be like, oh, 50 bucks. Or they’ll like overestimate, oh, $200. And I’m like, well, it’s not $200. So you guys need to like the person offering to pay isn’t willing to pay, so we need to adjust. And if they go 50 bucks, I say, okay, well, how long do you think this will take? And we’ll allow that I know the zone that it should be in and it’s a great way for them to get going about it because they may work really hard

[15:13] and really fast and together, or they may drag it out. And then we have a check and balance, which I actually wanna go back to expectations. You said that we’re gonna have a handful of those expectations. Talk to us about the communication. So where are those posted? What does that look like? How does that work as a family? Absolutely. Well, under our prosperity parents umbrella, we highly recommend a piece of paper on the fridge. You can get fancier with that. We actually even have an app that helps people. And I think the great beginning of the conversation, this is at dinnertime when it’s not rushed, ideally on a weekend when the conversation can continue is to just say, we all live together in this home

[16:00] and we have a new approach that we’re gonna try. And here are what we think the benefits are of this approach and keep the conversation simple. And what some of those benefits are is more freedom and responsibility for you. So the children are gonna pick up on that fairly quickly. Maybe not your two-year-old or your three-year-old, but literally even a five-year-old understands the concept of freedom and responsibility. And of course the older children are. And when you lead with benefits and then you say in order to get more freedom and responsibility, we’re going to work this dinner table economy, if you will, with these three E’s and then talk about the expectations, the expenses and the extra pay.

[16:58] I love it. This is so good. So for all of you families, again, if you have little kids, if you have adult children or if you’re in a empty nester household, this is a time that you can recalibrate. And so even for homeschool families, like we’re a year round homeschool. So when people say back to school, we’re just like, oh, that means fall, which, hey, that’s harvest time. That’s great. That means that you did a lot of work, you get some rewards, you recalibrate, you get ready for winter, et cetera, et cetera. You went through it growing up on a farm. You know what it’s like. So the work never stops. It’s wonderful. Correct. And that’s the reward. For any of you listeners, what we suggest is recalibrate now.

[17:50] And for the additional recalibration, can you give us the link or tell us what the website is for that app so our families can get tuned in? Absolutely. So under the Prosperity Parents umbrella, the app is available. And so really where I would have people go is to ProsperityParents.com. And there is a free community that they will get the link to that. And then there’s a paid for community if they feel like they want some conversation and additional support. Okay, perfect. We’ll put a link to Prosperity Parents inside the show notes. Thank you for spending your time with us today. It was a joy. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you,

[18:44] visit ProsperityThinkers.com.