Every so often, I get an email that warms my heart…financial literacy wise. It’s usually from one of our Camp Millionaire instructors or Money Game instructors around the globe and often it’s from a parent who is so happy their son or daughter learned about money in our camp program.
The following came as an email from our Money Game instructor in New Zealand. She’s been teaching The Money Game to school classrooms for a while now and is being sponsored by a great company in New Zealand called New Zealand Home Loans. Congrats to them for helping Anita make a huge difference in those student’s futures.
Here’s the email…
My 10 year old twin boys made their first ‘big’ purchase today and I just wanted to share it with you!
They have been receiving pocket money since they were 5. They get half their age, and it is always split 3 ways (Spend/share/save). So at 10 they get $2 to spend, $2.50 to save and .50c to ‘share’.
They used to have a ‘moonjar’ to divide these amounts but at 10 we decided they could get a ‘real’ bank account. Today they withdrew some money from their savings, and bought a digital camera each!! They have been watching prices for a while now and noticed the camera’s were on special. So as well reaching their goal, they have learnt delayed gratification AND managed to SAVE $67 at the same time! ($50 on the camera, and $17 on the case).
WE must be the proudest parents on the planet right now!
Anita Stokes
Hamilton, New Zealand
PS: NZ just had their first EVER Money Week last week!! Exciting huh?!
Anita…thanks so much for doing what you’re doing for those kids. Their lives will be different and better because of you. Keep up the great work with your children and your students.
Money…in the worldly scope of making it and using it for whatever we need and want, there are many judgments and opinions about its use. We judge…
How it’s made
How it’s spent
How it’s invested
How it’s donated
How we think about it
Who makes how much and how they make it
Whether or not it should even be necessary
The fact is, however, it IS necessary…that is until we figure out some other way of getting the materials goods and services we need for life.
Money and The Internet
With the advent of the Internet, many people who might otherwise be out in the world, struggling to get by, found a new way to earn and make money. If they had a great product or service idea, they could now market that great idea on the internet and reach more people than traditional marketing ever dreamt of reaching…for far less money.
And if they didn’t have their own ideas, they could learn how to market other people’s ideas (we could coin a whole new acronym…OPI 🙂 by becoming successful affiliate marketers.
It’s been a great boon to college graduates who couldn’t find the jobs they thought they’d be handed after graduation, high school students who see through the entire ‘gotta get a job’ con and the 30 or 40 year olds who are exhausted from working too many hours making other people money.
The Internet has truly leveled the money making playing field and I for one am all for it! Finally, people can learn to make money from home so they can take care of their children, pets, older parents, gardens, and more. For many of us, working at home is a lifestyle we would do just about anything not to give up.
All this being said, a few weeks ago, I discovered a company called Empower Network that is teaching people how to make money on the internet…and they are doing it in the most brilliant way…by giving them, for $25/month!, a completely pre-designed, ready to work, blogging system that’s built on a platform that drives traffic just because of the system. (The explanation of this takes another blog if you don’t understand what drives internet traffic yet.)
The Empower Network is so strong that I joined myself and am thrilled with the opportunity. I TEACH people to constantly look for opportunities (and there are millions of them) that will allow them to make money and do good. I love combining those two things!
Well, this morning, I got a letter from one of my Money Game coaches who sweetly questioned what I was up to…not understanding their entire program. He didn’t understand why Empower is doing what they are doing and doesn’t realize the amazingly honest opportunity the two young men behind Empower have created for people literally around the globe, to make money and do good.
Here’s the letter I received (unsigned of course)…
I’m a little surprised you’ve taken the Empower Network approach, and I believe that you may profit from it now, probably learn a lot, but at a cost of your integrity. Of course I could be wrong, but the Empower Network has been around for a couple years and already many people are complaining at the lack of integrity ie hidden costs, inaccurate and misleading claims of profits, predictable (even comical) NLP tactics that so many people fall for, etc.
While I do support The Money Game and mission to increase financial literacy, I do not support Empower Network affiliation and their particular MLM deceptively. If I have over looked something and you can enlighten me, please do so..
Thanks…J
And here’s my answer to this letter which I’m sure you’ll enjoy…
Good morning J…
Thank you for your letter. Rest assured, my integrity is fully intact and I know what I’m doing. I spent many, many evenings researching this company, the players and their approach.
While I am not your typical MLM girl in that I do not like to do parties, sell vitamins or hair shampoo, I do wholeheartedly approve of network marketing, also known as multi-level marketing and direct selling, as a brilliant business model that works for a lot of people. And network marketing shouldn’t be confused with a pyramid scheme. They are completely different. One is illegal and unethical and the other is legal and sound.
The fact is, Empower Network hasn’t been around for two years…they are less than a year old. The people who might be complaining are people who complain about just about everything anyway…and they don’t understand the program.
Emppower is marketing a product, a blogging system, that is ready to use, and helps people build an internet marketing business brilliantly. Blogging and internet marketing are very acceptable ways of making a living in this day and age and Empower has provided the most amazing way of doing this…and I’ve seen a ton of things come and go on the internet.
The two men who started Empower Network, David Wood and David Sharp, aka Dave and Dave, are full of integrity and they want to help people succeed, not only by making money but by learning that they CAN make money and do good with their money.
We’ve already seen people earn enough money to pay their mortgages on homes they were about to lose so their familes didn’t have to move and people being able to pay medical bills (I know this one personally) and other great stories. These same people would be in a world of financial hurt if they had to go out and look for a job to pay these critical expenses.
There is such taboo around money…the making of it, the spending of it, the saving of it, the investing of it, the donating of it…it’s the most interesting substance on the planet. Making money in and of itself is critical to one’s success in life. How much money we have affects our health (food, water, shelter, medical) and our happiness.
If we make judgments about how money must be made, i.e., you must work hard for it, you must make it doing good, you must earn it from a job, etc., we spend our lives judging others and often times, are never financially successful ourselves. I have been doing money coaching for years and I see this all the time.
The Empower Network guys have created great thing. They are empowering people all over the world, literally, by giving people a decent honest way to make money and they are teaching them how to make money not just by blogging and sharing what they know but by using the marketing techniques to sell/market/spread anything they might have a passion for…for instance, financial education programs that change the world. :-).
I appreciate your concern, but don’t listen to the naysayers. I did the research. Empower Network is a great organization with a heart-filled purpose and I’m enjoying learning from these two young knuckleheads (David Wood has the silliest laugh:) very much!
Hope that helps…
Have a fabulous day…Elisabeth
The bottom line is that the more judgment we attach to people and their money, the more we judge ourselves with money and the more we judge ourselves with money, the worse our financial situations become.
It may not make total sense, but I’ve seen it over and over again in my coaching business.
Your wealth work for today is to look at your money judgments…what are they, who do they concern, where do you spend the most energy judging money and most importantly, what are your judgments about yourself and money?
I promise that if you’ll spend a bit of time looking at the answers to these questions, you might just learn why you have the money challenges you have…and we all have them…it’s just that we all have money challenges that are unique to our personal judgments.
Guest Post by Brian Hamilton, Bestselling Author of 90 Day Money Challenge. Please visit his site for the other 3 reasons budgets don’t work.
Who should handle the budgeting in a marriage? The husband or the wife? The spender or the saver? The nerd or the free spirit? If you want to be wealthy, you need to do what wealthy people do. And their answer is: both of you!
The #4 reason that most budgets don’t work is because you don’t work together with your spouse.
The Budget Committee Meeting (BCM)
If you’re married, it’s time for the BCM: a quick budget meeting with your spouse before every month for the rest of your lives.
You are not taking over the money, your spouse is not taking over the money, you are going to work together and you both have a vote. You are both adults. You’re not daddy taking care of a spoiled little girl or mommy taking care of a little boy and dishing out his allowance; you are two adults working together.
BCM Ground Rules
This meeting should take place at the kitchen table with the TV off.
Nerds:
1. Do a rough draft of the budget
2. Bring it to the meeting
3. Be quiet (all of your opinions are on the page)
4. Make it brief
5. Let the free spirit change something (you’re getting their support when you make it “our” plan)
Free Spirits:
1. Come to the meeting
2. Talk at the meeting and have mature input
3. Agree to every number on the page or vote to change it
4. You can no longer say, “Whatever you want to do” (this is part of having mature input)
A Contract
Once both of you agree on the budget, it’s now a contract for the month. Pinky swear and spit shake that you will both stick to spending the amounts you agreed to at the meeting.
The BCM is the biggest thing that can improve your marriage and stop money fights, assuming you can keep your word and you have integrity. Make each other a promise and keep that promise.
We’ve had a BCM every month since we’ve been married and we’ve never spent any money that wasn’t in the budget without having an EBCM (Emergency BCM) first. That’s where something comes up in the middle of the month and you add an expense to the budget, rebalance it, and agree on it with your spouse before you do the spending.
Warning
If this is the first time you have done a budget with this much detail, I can almost guarantee it’s not going to work out according to your plan. But it does get easier. The first month may take close to an hour, but we now spend about three minutes per month on this (because our budget doesn’t change much anymore).
If you implement the BCM, you’re going to learn to work together in a way you’ve never worked together before and you’re going to see your marriage improve dramatically.
Question: Are you having any trouble getting your spouse on board?
Creative Wealth in Santa Barbara is gearing up for it’s one and only summer Camp Millionaire July 28-29th.
With our focus shifting to training others how to teach their own Camp Millionaire and Money Game events, we’ve only got one camp scheduled…but there are a few more around the country.
Here’s a short list of summer financial camps to choose from:
Santa Barbara, CA
July 28-29th, 2012
Ages 10-14
Cost: $199/25% sibling discount
Scholarships…a few left.
Call 805-957-1024 or visit www.campmillionaire.com for more info/to sign up.
Anaheim, CA
Fairmont Private Schools
15310 West La Palma Ave.
Aug. 6-10, 2012
Age: 10-14
Cost: $300
Contact Darren Orshoff at 951-323-2119
Los Gatos, CA
July 9-13, 2012
Ages 10-13
Cost: $349
July 16-20
Ages 14 and up
Cost: $349
Contact: Kathleen Fitts at 408-335-3959
UC – Riverside
July 23-27, 2012
Ages 10 and up
Cost: $360
Contact: Danielle Wright at 760-565-3636
Atlanta, GA
Jonathan Rosen Foundation
3805 Crestwood Parkway
Duluth, GA 30096
Guest post by our newest Expert Panel Member, Claudia Mulcahy
In Alice in Wonderland, Alice is lost, and asks the Cheshire cat for directions to get out of the place in which she currently finds herself. The cat tells Alice that getting out depends on where you want to be, and then asks Alice where does she want to get to.
Alice says, “anywhere.” The Cheshire cat tells her that if she wants to be anywhere it really doesn’t matter which way she goes!
Dream big, and carry a big stick! That stick may come in handy. It can be used to fend off negative attitudes, beliefs and fears.
There will be those who can’t support your big dream. That’s because it’s too big for them to conceive. They can’t imagine it.
To pull again from Alice in Wonderland, it was the Queen who said, “Sometimes I imagine six impossible things before breakfast!”
If your goal is big, or long range, break it down. It could be a few months out; it could be a years. Either way, you’re moving toward your dream; your goal.
Could you swim the first you got in the water? Did you have immediate success riding a bike? It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes persistance.
Standing where you are, look in the direction of where you want to go. Let’s call where you are, Point A and where you want to go, Point B. The next step is to build a bridge from point A to point B.
Do you need to set up a savings account specifically for travel, or a buying a car?
Do you need to get a passport, or driver’s permit?
Those are actions that it may take to build your bridge…and everyone’s bridge is different.
Do your research. How much money do you need? By what date? Do you have someone who will hold you accountable to what you say is a priority? (Yeah, but. . . doesn’t work in a budget.)
What works? Focus works. Commitment works.
“Make every step you take go in that direction.” — Socrates.
I’m going to make this short and sweet…or at least that’s my intention.
I just stumbled on a prepaid card called the UPside Visa Card but I don’t see any upside to this.
Why would you pay a monthly fee to use a prepaid, preloaded ‘debit’ card if you could just put that same money into your checking account and spend it using a REAL debit card? This is just flat out stupid (yes, ask me how I really feel).
This card, called the UPside Card is dubbed as ‘the prepaid Visa card for teens and their parents’ and well, I must be missing something because I don’t understand the point. They say on their website:
UPside Visa is a reloadable prepaid Visa card designed for the 13-25 age group and their parents. The card remains under the supervision of parents.
OK, so if the teen has it, HOW exactly is it still under the supervision of the parents?
This is text right from their site:
For high school students, it’s a great alternative to cash allowances that are unsafe, offer no spending control and often require trips to the ATM. It’s also a great educational tool to learn about financial literacy.
For college students, it’s a convenient way to manage their money, track spending in real-time and stay away from credit cards. College students can receive occasional funds from their parents, receive a pay check directly onto the card and even write checks online (For cardholders 18 or over)
Let me get this straight…if you have this card, kids can control their spending but if they have cash they can’t? This is completely bassackwards as my mother would say. When kids SEE the cash start to run out, they stop spending but if they can’t SEE what’s on the card, they have to stop when the card doesn’t work anymore!
As far as a convenient way to manage their money, track spending, etc., my experience is that my checking account using Quicken or my old fashioned check book register certainly does the same thing!
FEES…there are ALWAYS fees!
If you’ll look here, if you want to be able to access your money via an ATM, you pay $2.99 or you could just pay a $29.95/year fee (evidently that’s a better value than saving the $29.95 in your saving account and not using this card).
But look…they don’t charge the parents a fee for putting money INTO their kid’s card from their checking account but don’t try to load it from a credit card…more fees. How generous…NOT.
And finally, don’t be fooled by the Rewards program. Note that you redeem some of the points in the UPside Mall (oh goodie…a trip to the mall) but they do offer some cash rewards.
Bottom line: USE THE BANK. Teach your kids to use THEIR money using a REAL bank account and then when they’re ready to handle the responsibilities of a real credit card, have them apply and manage a credit card wisely. And tell them to get a card with points so at least if they are going to use a credit card, they can use the reward points to book a flight home to visit you once in awhile for free!
