The next lesson in the Life Lessons series is that we need to learn to make a budget. In this time with our kids, we started with a simple budget using, as an example, an estimated starting school teacher’s salary in the US. From there, we then considered taxes, tithes, living expenses, and other ways of prioritizing the ways that we spend our money. I wanted the kids to have a sense of how this works, even though we didn’t really get into a great amount of detail on each of the items.
Here is the spreadsheet that we used as we discussed this example budget. I simply used a Google Chromecast to show the screen from my computer to the TV where the family watched and discussed the budget together.
As I think about future Life Lessons related to finances, I want the kids to think about prioritizing how to use their money, including how to manage their tax burden, where to give their money, how to invest or how to make money, etc. More to come!