The First National Bank of Dad: A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Va

Description: The First National Bank of Dad by David Owen Synopsis coming soon....... FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Every parent wants to raise financially responsible children, but often, any efforts to teach kids about money are doomed from the start. As David Owen learned with his own daughter and son, parents who take a traditional approach to talking about money will find that their children learn all the fiscal restraint of an Enron executive. So Owen devised a novel approach: he established the Bank of Dad, offering simple terms and generous incentives for saving, and then stepped aside and gave his young children the freedom to use their money as they wanted. Instead of blowing it all on candy and toys, they developed a strong sense of financial discipline and responsibility. As they grew older, he added a stock exchange to the Bank of Dad to broaden their understanding of investing. It sounds complicated, but its not. His kids will have to work for a living someday, but they are well armed to meet their financial needs and responsibilities. They are avid savers; they know how to balance their checkbooks; they understand the principles of investing in stocks and bonds. The First National Bank of Dad is a highly accessible guide that offers excellent financial tips for any family and shows readers just how to implement this unusual and innovative plan in their own households. Author Biography David Owen plays in a weekly foursome, takes mulligans off the first tee, practices intermittently at best, wore a copper wristband because Steve Ballesteros said so, and struggles for consistency even though his swing is consistent -- just mediocre. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker, a contributing editor to Golf Digest, and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly. His other books include The First National Bank of Dad, The Chosen One, The Making of the Masters, and My Usual Game. He lives in Washington, Connecticut. Table of Contents Contents CHILDREN AND MONEY: AN INTRODUCTION THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF DAD RESPONSIBILITY AND CONTROL ALLOWANCES BEANIE BABY ECONOMICS THE DAD STOCK EXCHANGE TRUE NET WORTH THE BEST INVESTMENT YOU CAN MAKE FOR YOUR CHILDREN THE ULTIMATE PAYOFF Review "Lively and entertaining, filled with self-deprecating humor, anecdotes, insights, and clear explanations." -- USA Today"Saving money . . . should be the childs choice. For an idea that might get your kids to a nest egg voluntarily, take a look at David Owens book The First National Bank of Dad." -- Jane Bryant Quin, Newsweek"When your children grow up, few things will affect their lives as much as the presence or absence of money. Unfortunately, most teachers and parents devote little systematic attention to teaching them how to live their economic lives. Start with this enjoyable book for some excellent suggestions." -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"This is a terrific little book that could completely change the way many parents think about children and money." -- Publishers Weekly Long Description Every parent wants to raise financially responsible children, but often, any efforts to teach kids about money are doomed from the start. As David Owen learned with his own daughter and son, parents who take a traditional approach to talking about money will find that their children learn all the fiscal restraint of an Enron executive. So Owen devised a novel approach: he established the Bank of Dad, offering simple terms and generous incentives for saving, and then stepped aside and gave his young children the freedom to use their money as they wanted. Instead of blowing it all on candy and toys, they developed a strong sense of financial discipline and responsibility. As they grew older, he added a stock exchange to the Bank of Dad to broaden their understanding of investing. It sounds complicated, but its not. His kids will have to work for a living someday, but they are well armed to meet their financial needs and responsibilities. They are avid savers; they know how to balance their checkbooks; they understand the principles of investing in stocks and bonds. The First National Bank of Dadis a highly accessible guide that offers excellent financial tips for any family and shows readers just how to implement this unusual and innovative plan in their own households. Review Quote "When your children grow up, few things will affect their lives as much as the presence or absence of money. Unfortunately, most teachers and parents devote little systematic attention to teaching them how to live their economic lives. Start with this enjoyable book for some excellent suggestions."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Excerpt from Book Chapter One: Children and Money: An Introduction When our son was born, my wife and I needed a baby blanket for his crib. Our daughter, who was three and a half, had several old ones in her closet. "What are you doing in my closet?" she demanded. "Just getting one of these old blankets," my wife said. "Why?" "To give it to your new baby brother." "I want it!" our daughter screamed. "But, honey," I said, "you didnt even know that old blanket was there." "I need it!" "Its a baby blanket. Dont you want to give it to a baby?" "I want it!" My wife and I looked at each other in despair. What to do? Suddenly, my wife had an inspiration. "Would you take five bucks for it?" she asked. (No more crying.) "O.K." Money is a handy tool if you use it wisely. Even very young children get the hang of it in a hurry. In the baby-blanket incident just described, my wife narrowly averted a family crisis by offering to swap an emotionally neutral symbol (money) for an emotionally loaded one (the old blanket). With a crisp five-dollar bill in her piggy bank, our daughter felt justly compensated for this latest unpleasant ramification of the birth of her baby brother. And my wife and I were delighted to give her the cash, because doing so let us go back to what we had been doing before the argument arose: changing diapers, ignoring laundry, and not getting enough sleep. If my wife hadnt suddenly thought of monetary compensation, our fight would have escalated along a predictable trajectory: my wife and I would have stepped up our efforts to make our daughter feel like a bad child, and our daughter would have stepped up her efforts to make us feel like bad parents. Instead, everyone went to bed that night in a pretty good mood. A couple of months later, our daughter even reconciled herself to the idea of no longer being an only child. Walking alongside her brothers stroller, she said suddenly, with a sigh of resignation, "I dont know who Ill marry. Him, I guess." GROWN-UPS ARE DUMB Money is so easy to understand in theory that youd think more people would do a good job of handling it in practice. But they dont. In many families, financial matters become a psychological theater of war not only between parents and children but also between parents and parents. Why does that happen? We probably dont want to know the real reasons. (One familys story: I claim to think money is pure pragmatism, while my wife believes its all symbolism and neurosis.) But there are ways of sidestepping the problem altogether, especially where children are concerned -- as long as parents take advantage of human nature instead of ignoring it or futilely attempting to change it. Most efforts by most parents to teach most kids about money are doomed from the start. Those efforts usually begin (and often end) with the opening of savings accounts. The parents suddenly decide that the time has come to impose order on their childrens chaotic financial affairs, so they march the kids down to the bank and sign them up for passbooks. The children are intrigued at first by the notion that a bank will pay them for doing nothing, but their enthusiasm fades when they realize that the interest rate is minuscule and, furthermore, that their parents dont intend to give them access to their principal. To a kid, a savings account is just a black hole that swallows birthday checks. Kid: "Grandma gave me twenty-five dollars!" Parent: "How nice. Well put that check straight into your savings account." Kid: "But she gave it to me! I want it!" Parent: "Oh, it will still be yours. You just have to keep it in the bank so that it can grow." Kid (suspicious): "What do you mean grow?" Parent: "Well, if you leave your twenty-five dollars in the bank for just one year, the bank will pay you fifty cents. And if you leave all of that in the bank for just one more year, the bank will give you another fifty cents, plus an extra penny besides. Thats called compound interest. It will help you go to college." The main problem with these schemes is that theres nothing in them for the kids. College seems a thousand years away to young children -- who, at this point, probably think theyd just as soon stay home, anyway -- and the promised annual return wouldnt cover even the cost of a pack of chewing gum. Most children immediately realize that banking plans implemented by their parents are actually punitive in intent: their true purpose is not to promote saving but to prevent consumption. Appalled by what their children spend on candy and video games -- and also appalled, perhaps, by the degree to which their childrens profligacy seems to mimic their own -- the parents devise stratagems for impounding excess resources. Almost every family has its unspoken point of no return -- a limit above which monetary gifts are considered too large to be entrusted to young spenders. According to the perverse arithmetic that parents thus impose, a five-dollar bill (which a child is usually allowed to keep) is far more valuable to the child than a hundred-dollar check (which parents usually expropriate and "save"). Not surprisingly, kids soon decide that large sums arent real money and that all cash should either be spent immediately or hidden in a drawer. I know these things happen, because I made all the same mistakes. When my daughter reached kindergarten, I gave her a lecture on the virtues of fiscal prudence, then opened a savings account in her name with a deposit of a hundred dollars. Her excitement about my scheme, never great, sank to zero when I told her that she would not be allowed to touch that money any time soon. No matter how enthusiastically I praised the American banking system, she viewed her savings account as a fiction. My first reaction was that she must be too young, or maybe too lazy, to plan, in a mature and responsible fashion, for her old age. However, on further reflection (over the course of several years, unfortunately), I realized that the problem wasnt a defect in her character; the problem was a defect in my plan. After all, I dont have a savings account myself -- and why should I? Id rather keep money in a mattress than do all that driving back and forth to the bank for a lousy 2 percent per annum. I store my wealth in the same places you store yours: in stocks and bonds and real estate and money-market accounts and other investments, all of which generate better returns over time than a dumb old savings account. Why had I believed that a five-year-old, for whom a year seems to last at least a decade, would be impressed by handfuls of pennies doled out over eons? Hadnt I closed out my own childhood savings account the moment it came under my sole control? (Yes.) I had also forgotten that, to a kid, "long term" does not mean "long term" -- it means "never." Encouraging a nursery-schooler to save for college is like encouraging a fifty-year-old to save for the colonization of Mars. When I was five, a century did not seem longer to me than the period between my first day of kindergarten and the day when I would finally be old enough to do the one thing I wanted to do more than anything in life: drive a car. (A further proof, as if any were needed, that time passes more slowly for children than it does for adults: you never hear a grown-up say, "Im six hundred and seventy-three months old" -- although I did once hear a forty-year-old say, "Im half-dead now.") This perception of the passage of time isnt even an illusion where children are concerned; when parents talk to their kids about "long term" in connection with money, the parents usually do mean "never." Parents force their children to lock away their money because the parents hate to think what their children would do with that money if they could. The real purpose of almost all parent-mandated saving schemes is not self-improvement but confiscation. A savings account is just a jail in which parents incarcerate their childrens money so that their childrens money wont be able to go around causing trouble when the parents arent looking. REAL REASONS TO SAVE You and I dont think of saving for ourselves as a form of punishment. You and I save because we are convinced that saving will make our lives better, and that it will do so while we are still on hand to enjoy the fun. If we sacrifice some spending now, we believe, then someday in the foreseeable future we will be able to buy a fancier car, or play more golf, or add a swimming pool to our yard, or send our kids to more impressive-sounding colleges, or retire at eighty-five instead of ninety. In other words, we save for selfish reasons. We spend less money now in order to spend more money later. If children are to become savers, I suddenly realized, then they need selfish reasons, too -- selfish reasons that make sense to them. To be attractive to a child, saving has to make life better for the child -- and the benefits have to be tangible, just as they are for adults. Those benefits also have to arrive in what to the child seems like real time, rather than being pushed so far into the future that in the mind of the child they simply do not exist. Most important of all, I realized that up until that moment almost all of my efforts to teach my daughter financial responsibility had consisted of reducing or eliminating what few financial responsibilities she had. How could she possibly learn Details ISBN1416534253 Author David Owen Short Title 1ST NATL BANK OF DAD Publisher Simon & Schuster Language English ISBN-10 1416534253 ISBN-13 9781416534259 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2007 Subtitle A Foolproof Method for Teaching Your Kids the Value of Money Country of Publication United States Place of Publication New York Illustrations black & white illustrations Affiliation University of Southampton Imprint Simon Spotlight Entertainment DOI 10.1604/9781416534259 NZ Release Date 2007-04-24 US Release Date 2007-04-24 UK Release Date 2007-04-24 Pages 208 Publication Date 2007-04-24 DEWEY 332.024054 Audience General AU Release Date 2007-07-01 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:10322551;

Price: 42.59 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2024-12-20T03:21:52.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD