by Tricia
My son looks absolutely adorable with his missing tooth. As suspected, the Tooth Fairy made a visit last night and left a nice dollar bill in exchange for his tooth. She didn’t leave a savings bond as I first thought she would do.
It turns out that I had some troubles writing up an explanation of a savings bond and I felt it may be too much for my son to understand. I toyed with an idea of a Tooth Fairy Bank and tried to work out an “interest” scheme, but that didn’t work out well either. In the end, the Tooth Fairy gave my son a nice letter and left the dollar bill. My son was very happy at that.
I do think it’s important to try teach our children some personal finance and I believe one of the best ways is to discuss it is when the opportunity arises. I thought the Tooth Fairy idea would be a good one, but it didn’t materialize. But there are other ways to sneak in some lessons. For example, when my son has money to spend and we go to the store, I mention to him that he doesn’t have to spend his money now. He can always save it for later.
I thought that my words were falling on deaf ears because my son would spend all of the money he had with him, but my son proved me wrong. Yesterday, he had three dollars in the “Spend” portion of his piggy bank and he wanted to go shopping. We stopped at a dollar store and he was looking through everything. I didn’t say a word this time about saving his money for later. He picked up a box of $1.00 crayons and said, “I could buy these for $1.00 and then save $2.00 for later.”
That was a super-proud-mommy-moment. Even though I thought he wasn’t listening, he really was 🙂