COO Monica Eaton on Teaching Children to Manage Money This Holiday Season
Chargebacks911® COO Monica Eaton, a leading expert in the payments and fintech fields, was asked to share her financial advice in a recent feature for GOBankingRates.
When GOBankingRates launched in 2004, their goal was to make finding competitive interest rates easier for the average consumer. Today, they offer this and much more, giving consumers and businesses the insights and expertise they need to make the most of their resources.
Ensuring that children have a baseline of financial literacy is a crucial lesson for parents to impart. In the piece, Monica and other experts weigh in on an inventive new idea: leveraging the holiday shopping season as a teaching moment.
“The holidays are a great time to teach children about the concept of value, demand, and worth,” Monica says. “Sometimes, adults forget how utterly foreign the ideas of money, capitalism, and pricing are to adolescents.”
It’s important for kids to be able to gauge value. Specifically, to have the skills necessary to determine whether goods make sense at certain price points. Even more important, kids need to know when it’s best to simply walk away.
“Because it’s not intuitive, children must be taught: it’s not enough just to covet something–you must also have the skills to analyze whether or not the price-point makes sense for your specific budget. If it doesn’t, then walk away. And really, that’s where it should begin with a kid: Give them a fixed budget and help them learn how to assess value and worth.”
