

Today is Teach Children to Save Day

April 23, 2012
Estherville Daily News

This is National Teach Children to Save Day, a day designated by the American Bankers Association to show the importance of teaching our nation's youth about saving money.

For ABA members, it's more than a slogan. Every April, bankers make presentations in grades K-12 about budgeting, saving, recognizing needs and wants and how interest makes money grow.

Particularly in light of the financial crisis from which we are (hopefully) emerging, children need to be taught at a young age the importance of saving.

We've just come through a period in which, unfortunately, that was not the case - when the measure of one's "wealth" was how much one could borrow, when credit limits were the supposed designator of wealth.

What National Teach Children to Save Day does is to show children how saving money and making money through investing is far better than borrowing and paying interest. And that's a far better foundation on which to build wealth than accumulating mountains of credit card debt.

By learning to save early - and no age is too early - savings becomes a habit and a value. It also becomes a lifestyle, someone that if children learn early enough will become something they will just do automatically when they're older.

The best place to start, of course, is by example. If we as adults can show children how to live by distinguishing "needs" from "wants", they'll learn to do the same.

We can also help children learn to save by giving them their own piggy bank (anyone remember those?) and if they're a little older, their own savings account.

So let's all be an example - and show children how to save now.

It could save their future as well.



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