Life Lessons at Home

Education doesn’t have to stop just at the classroom door. In fact, it’s paramount to your children’s success that you keep reinforcing vital learning skills and independent thoughts while at home too. Often, it’s the perfect place to start fostering their entrepreneurial spirit. Focus on supplementing the things they’re learning at school. Is there a financial curriculum at your school? There isn’t for the vast majority. If not, this is definitely a big area to help your kids in. Try some activities that will make your kids think about creating independent wealth, and not just “working.” Help them to see that they can be their own boss and invent their own success, rather than relying on a company paycheck. At Pay Your Family First, we’re working to create the next generation’s CEOs and business leaders every day. Our gumball machines are one of the ways we’re helping to teach life lessons at home about being an entrepreneur. Kids have to maintain their own machine – checking inventory, profit and working with other businesses. It’s a great activity. Along the same lines are starting a lemonade stand with your younger children, or a lawn mowing business. Anything that gets them to think about being their own boss and independent ways to make money is great. Let’s not forget that knowing how to balance a checkbook, be financially responsible with a credit card and learning the difference between an asset and a liability will be a huge benefit to your children growing up. Be sure you cover all these as much as you can with real world lessons. If we all make a little effort to teach more at home, we’ll be raising a stronger generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs.