Involve Young Adults in Your Job to Teach Them Money Management

Young adults need money management skills to succeed in life. A great way to teach them money management and life management skills is to involve them in your job or occupation. Think "Take Your Daughter To Work Day" but on a much deeper level, allowing your young adults to see the reality of how you manage and earn money to provide for them.

No matter what your job or occupation you can find a way to involve the kids. You can involve them and share information, while still keeping salary and other personal information private. Even discussing a specific project or division of your company and how it functions can provide money management tools.

My wife was an occupational therapist and consulted with various senior centers, nursing homes and care facilities in our area. Not only would she occasionally take our teenagers with her to see what she did and interact with the patients, she involved them heavily in the administrative side of her business. They assisted with billing and invoicing customers, paying bills, filing taxes. They learned many money management and small business skills, in addition to compassion and respect when working with the elderly patients. Our kids could see how hard my wife worked and all the different functions that went into running a small business.

They learned the differences between being an independent contractor and working for a large company, as my wife worked for a single large hospital at times. They learned the pros and cons of each and could then decide which path they felt more comfortable with. Our daughter has always worked for large companies and our son has always run his own businesses and remained independent.

Through experiences like that, young adults learn money management and broader life management skills. They learn key lessons in responsibility and how you need to get up and go to work every day, in order to have money to manage. They also learn the value of work and the value of education in terms of earning a higher salary. Young adults can see what money they can earn in a day, and then may think about purchases more carefully. Is that new $300 pair of jeans really worth three days of work?

When the kids were young adults, I was working in the public relations for Prudential Financial, Inc. As a journalist, one of my responsibilities was to travel around the Eastern US region to interview the top insurance salesmen, to feature them in Prudential's various, newsletters, magazines and advertising. I would often take my teenage son on these two and three day trips, as they were about 85% traveling to the site and 15% working on the assignment. He saw how hard I worked and how I had to document my expenses. He also saw how the company celebrated the top salesman, and rewarded them for their hard work.

To earn extra money, I would teach journalism and photography classes at the local night schools a few days a week. I would also take my son with me, who could see what people need to do to provide the best for their family. I could have been sitting at home watching TV, but even that $200 a month earned from the teaching helped pay for family expenses. It further taught him the value of money, how hard it was to earn and how careful you need to be if you have it.

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