1. Take Them Grocery Shopping

Encourage your teen to participate in a “grocery day” with you to better understand financial literacy. Sit down with your child before shopping and go over your budget and your list. Explain to them how much you are looking to spend and the food you need for the week/month.

Have them help you coupon clip and try and make a goal to save a specific dollar amount. Take them with you to the store and have them help you look for each product. Make sure you stay within budget; you might want to consider bringing only cash with you so you don’t go over.

You can turn this into a fun adventure! This can make grocery shopping fun for the both of you.

2. Invite Them to Help You Organize Your Receipts

 After your holiday shopping, you might be stuck with a lot of receipts and bills. Invite your child to help you organize your receipts to understand how much expenses cost. Your child may be surprised to learn how expensive things can be. This might teach them to think twice before asking for luxury items next year.

Your child also may be interested in holding a job so they can pay for more discretionary expenses on their own. You could even teach them a little about tax on products when going through your receipts.

3. Set a Short-Term Savings Goal

Sit down with your pre-teen and ask them what their short-term goals are. They might not have an idea and that is OK. You might want to go over some of your short-term goals with them to help them better understand what they want. For example, maybe you want to plan a family vacation the following year or maybe save up for a new TV for the family room.

Pick a goal with your child and create a “savings jar” for that goal. Invite your child to contribute when they can. It can be very rewarding to reach your goal, especially if you reach it before you expected. Your teen will get motivated to help you — especially if it means they will be getting a vacation out of it!

4. Give Them Rewards Instead of Allowances

If your pre-teen doesn’t have a job, you might be giving them an allowance to spend on discretionary expenses. If this is the case, you might want to switch the allowance to a “rewards allowance.” Encourage your child to help out around the house with chores such as, cleaning, taking out the trash, doing the dishes or even helping with dinner.

If they meet each chore every week, you can reward them with an earned allowance. They will not only want to help out more, but they will realize you have to work for your money!

5. Have a Discussion

You can teach your child about money through games and lessons, but why not sit down and ask them what they know already? You might want to consider sitting down with your pre-teen once a week and discussing their financial goals, wants and needs. (You can track your financial goals, like building a good credit score, for free every 14 days on Credit.com.) Explain to them how much things cost and the importance of a job.

You can even teach your child about money each time you pay your bills. You don’t need to discuss numbers with them, but instead show them how to use a check, bank account and credit card. They will thank you later.

This article originally appeared on Credit.com.

5 Fun Ways to Teach Your Pre-Teen About Money is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.

Having a job at 15 is a great experience. I met many wonderful people that I wouldn’t have otherwise had to opportunity to meet, and I learned a little bit, if not much, of financial responsibility.

I would have rather had worked for a retail clothing store, but the town I lived in had few. The ones that did exist were tiny, and fully staffed with retirees or stay at home moms with plenty of work experience in that sort of thing.

This is the way it was for many people, particularly students, in my town. The job options were limited, so

we ended up bussing for half an hour into the city adjacent, or we’d work at fast food places that spattered throughout the municipality. Even the city that was close by was small at that time, and the options were, and still are, extremely limited.

At work, I met a co-worker who lived in one of the poorer sections of a particular suburb in the town. She had three kids and was a single mom. One day, while I was enjoying my lunch break outside on the makeshift patio of this fast food restaurant, she came out for her break as well. She was visibly upset, and when I asked her what was wrong, she had a bit of a breakdown.

She told me that she had just gone through a divorce and she had three children; a ten year old, an eight year old, and a four year old. Her ex-husband was nowhere to be found and didn’t pay child support despite her efforts to get it from him. Her kids were left with her mother, who was also extremely poor, while she worked her fast food job in overtime.

She lamented to me that her $8/hour salary wasn’t enough to pay the bills and feed her children. Her only other option was to go into the adjacent city to make $1/hour more, but because she couldn’t afford the expenses of a car, she didn’t have transportation. The $1/hour more she would make in the city would mean she would have to take the bus and put her kids in daycare or hire a babysitter for the duration of her added commute, since her mother and her had a system where she picked up her kids 15 minutes before her mother left for her own job.

Her options were severely limited, despite her having tried to get a job at some of the higher paying places in our small town. It just wasn’t possible.

She told me that she was living paycheque to paycheque, or worse. She had only eaten an apple all day that day, because she couldn’t afford groceries to feed her kids and herself, so naturally the food went to her kids.

She wanted to go to the food bank, but worked during the day and couldn’t make it before it closed. It was in the next city over.

That night, when we were closing the fast food restaurant up, there was a lot of leftover food which had been hanging out in the holding bins because we weren’t able to sell it. Things like chicken thighs, french fries, and leftover burgers. We were required every night to do an inventory of what was left over, and throw it all out after the inventory was done.

There were notices in the kitchen saying that we were not to take food out of the kitchen at any time without paying for it; even the food left over at the end of the night was to either be paid for at a 20% discount by employees, or thrown out. We were under camera surveillance to ensure compliance with this crazy policy.

It killed me to throw out that extra food when a fellow employee was practically starving and unable to feed her children. She couldn’t afford the food at a 20% discount, especially since fast food is already marked up an alarming amount.

So there was the choice: throw out the food, or go against company policy and risk my job (and my coworkers’ jobs) to send her home with the leftover food.

The choice was ridiculous. The food was not salvageable as the restaurant was closed. Nobody could have, or would have, purchased it. It was supposed to be going in the dumpster.

So, this is sort of like the Robin Hood story – do you “steal” from the rich, to give to the poor, or do you wastefully throw away perfectly good food because nobody can buy it?

What is your conclusion? What would you have done?

The Robin Hood Conundrum is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.