3 Free Apps to Teach Your Kids About Money -

By: Danielle Pietersen

Teaching your kids about money is important. Setting your child up with a good knowledge of money and how to work with it, will help them become financially independent adults who can make wise choices about their finances and budgets.

There are some wonderful, free apps that can help you teach your children about money and increase their financial literacy. Gone are the days of scrounging for spare change to pay your kids for chores. The best money apps make the process quick and easy and will have your kids adding to their savings accounts in no time!

What Can I Teach My Child About Money?

Talking to your children about money, budgeting and saving is key to developing financial literacy. It’s also really important that you let them practice earning, spending, and saving money. There are a few important principles that you can teach your kids from an early age. The idea is to teach them to make good financial decisions and instill healthy spending habits.

Teach Them How To Do The Math

Teach your children how to work with dollars and cents. They need to learn to do basic financial calculations like adding up totals, understanding expenses, and working out interest on their savings. As part of teaching them about how money works, you can also set up a bank account or savings account in their name so that they can watch their savings grow and learn to make savvy financial decisions.

Mobile apps are particularly good at helping them track how much money they’re saving and spending. Apps can help improve their financial literacy and often have games that introduce them to ideas like saving and investing and how to set financial goals.

Teach Them To Save

Teach your children that saving in the short term can result in far bigger rewards in the long term. Practicing this sort of delayed gratification is very good for their financial literacy and sets them up to take control of their finances and avoid debt as adults. Developing their money-saving skills is also generally character building and will help them develop self-control in other areas too.

Teach Them How To Spend

Teaching kids about money is not just about teaching them how money works and encouraging them to save. Many parents teach their children to save money and manage the math, but forget to teach them how to spend money. Help your children think through what is important to them and how they spend their money.

Teach Them To Give

It’s important to teach your children that all of their money is not just for them. Even if you’re working hard on teaching them money-saving skills, it’s important to remember that saving money isn’t the only thing that is important when it comes to making the best money decisions and building financial literacy.

Whether it’s giving to protect endangered animals, helping orphans, contributing to a meal for someone who has fallen on hard times, or buying a gift for a friend, teaching your kids to share now, will help them become generous adults. They will also be able to identify a worthy cause when it comes to donating their hard-earned money.

Teach Them About Debt

Teach your children about debt. It’s important to have conversations about the hard topics. Help them to understand the dangers of debt and overspending with credit cards. Not all debt is bad, but it’s important that your kids understand that most debt just ends up being really expensive. Teach them about different kinds of debt and show them the value of saving and investing to set them up for a life of financial success.

Let Them Fail, Sometimes

Sometimes experience is the best teacher. If your kids are going to fail, let them do it under your roof, when it doesn’t affect their credit score or max out their credit card. Being allowed to fail and feel the regret that comes with spending hastily or buying a cheap toy that breaks quickly, teaches financial lessons for the future.

So Which App Do I Choose?

It’s important to decide how you will teach your children about finances. Apps have different strengths and weaknesses, ultimately, you are the teacher, so choose the apps that will be the best tools to help you in your task.

RoosterMoney: Comprehensive and Well Rounded

RoosterMoney is a really comprehensive money app for the whole family. It’s aimed at ages 4-17, so it’s great for small kids, teens, and even young adults. This is the best choice if you’re looking for something the whole family can use. It teaches budgeting, financial literacy and uses a “save, spend, share approach”, which helps your kids save and develop healthy spending habits.

Piggy-Bot: Keeps It Simple

Piggy-Bot is basically a virtual piggy bank. It’s a great way to keep track of how much money each child has accumulated. You can use the app to track how much money they earn, save and spend per month. It’s not linked to your bank account, so if they want to spend money or move it to a savings account, you’ll need to give them cash or do a transfer into their account.

UPromise: Best For Future Planning

UPromise is a little different from the other free money apps. This one is a real winner if you’re teaching your kids about saving and investing. With UPromise, you earn cashback as you go about your normal daily tasks, like shopping or eating out. The rewards can be transferred into an eligible 529 savings plan.

It’s a great way to get the kids involved in saving and investing in their future. The best part is that they can also be involved in earning money for their college fund. They can help you track ways to earn rewards or even ask family members to sign up and contribute to a fund on their behalf. You probably won’t use UPromise as your primary app to help your kids track their savings, but it’s a great add-on to any other app you choose.

What Age Should I Give My Child Pocket Money?

You can really start at any age. The important thing is to make sure that it’s an age-appropriate amount and that you have an age-appropriate amount of input into how they spend and manage their money.

How Much Do They Need?

This will vary greatly from family to family. The best way to decide on an appropriate amount is to consider what sort of things you imagine they will buy with their money and how long it would take them to save for those items. Once you’ve figured this out, you’ll be able to calculate an appropriate amount per month for them.

How Much Financial Responsibility Do You Expect Them To Take?

If you want them to make contributions to a savings account, or investment, or teach them to put money aside for college, then the amount would be bigger than if you imagine they will be using it to buy candy and toys.

Grow With Them

As children become young adults they can start taking responsibility for more of their monthly expenses and savings goals. The amount of pocket money they receive will naturally increase until they start earning their own money and growing in their financial freedom. Different apps may become more or less appropriate through the different ages and stages, so feel free to use more than one or make changes as you grow and learn through the process.