Start talkin’ money with your family

A couple of surveys caught my eye this week – one having to do with high school graduates not really understanding much about money or feel confident about managing their own money. We know teens are really good at spending it though! So lots of work to be done by parents and teachers on the simple lessons about the simple things including how to create a budget,use a checking account and debit card and the all-important credit card talk. Even if parents don’t feel they have done the best job of handling their own personal finances, what they tell their own kids will have a bigger impact on how their kids handle their money than anyone else. That’s a fact. I’m the spokesperson for the California Jump$tart Coalition and that fact always surprises people.

Now, speaking of families…on the other end of the spectrum are us adult kids who have an aging parent. Well, the a brand new survey just released this week points out a pretty startling fact – that almost half of adult kids realize and are worried about our parent’s ability to make big financial decisions. Yet at the same time, just like parents don’t really like to bring up the money conversation, we grow up believing it is rude to talk to our own parents about their finances. But somebody else is talking to them! Remember back in season one, we had this story about a retired couple living in Pennsylvania. They’re over 70. He’s a retired architect. She was a homemaker. They got ripped off and scammed into some non-existent investment by their own CPA! And the CPA was a trusted friend! Well, what I didn’t tell you in the piece you saw on TV was that their own grown son who lived not far away, is a registered financial advisor!  But Ruth didn’t want to “burden” her son with their personal financial questions so instead, they were systematically robbed of their entire life savings but the scumbag CPA. Tough lesson learned. What’s the moral of the story?  Drop the old belief that you shouldn’t discuss money, bills, and investments with your own kids or your parents and start talking money!

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