When Daniel Herbert was a child, he accompanied his mother to the bank and watched her use cash to pay for purchases.
“Today it’s all different,” said Herbert, president of the New Hampshire Jump$tart Coalition, which advocates for more financial education. “We have removed the psychology of money from our daily interaction with it.”
With online banking and shopping, money is more abstract than ever, which can make it hard to teach to kids. Yet the basics of money management, like budgeting, saving and avoiding debt, remain unchanged.
“Those are the all-important messages to try to teach kids,” Herbert said.
Debit-card programs like Greenlight are designed to give parents more oversight into kids’ digital spending, and giving allowances without cash.
Taking advantage of technology can also make it easier to keep kids engaged with financial education. Mascoma Bank has long offered in-person financial literacy education to schools and other venues, but it was never very popular.
“Nothing that we did seemed to gain any traction,” said Tom Hoyt, public relations and social media coordinator at Mascoma Bank.
When the bank partnered with Banzai, a web-based software that takes a game-like approach to financial literacy more schools showed interest. One teacher told Hoyt her students never want to stop using the app.
“They’re learning but they don’t know they’re learning,” he said.
Richard Reece, chairman of SCORE Mentors Upper Valley, has found technology helpful for teaching his grandchildren about finances.
While the concepts are the same as what he shared with his own children, the way that he’s teaching them is different, he said.
“You have to adapt and have fun with it,” he said.