Hello everyone! Welcome back to The Self-Reliant Steward podcast. I’m your host, Damia Shimmin.
Let’s jump right into our money trivia for this week.
Trivia: What is the average monthly amount a family of four spends on groceries? Answer: About $1,300!
I want to tell you a story.
One day, my parents got home from grocery shopping. As I helped unload the car, I felt uncomfortable with the amount of groceries I was seeing and the number of things in the car that had not been on the grocery list. I initially didn’t know exactly what I was feeling and why.
Later, while talking with someone about the situation, they helped me realize that I was experiencing fear.
The experience of unloading groceries from the car, with my perception that the amount exceeded our budget, took my subconscious mind back to my years growing up. My family was in a cycle of living paycheck to paycheck and going in and out of debt. My fear while unloading the car was that my family was going back into old patterns and that my needs were not going to be met.
Currently, our monthly budget is $650 for groceries and household. We’ve been struggling. We are currently making the mistake of underestimating costs, which is this week’s mistake teens make with money I am talking about. With the average family spending nearly $1,000 per month on groceries alone, trying to keep our budgeted amount for groceries and household under $650 does not add up.
There are things I can do to overcome this fear of my needs not being met and there are things my family and I can do to help our budget. But those topics are not the focus of this episode.
My goal for this episode is to help you gain ideas about what you can do for your family to help your children avoid or overcome the mistake of underestimating costs.
Why is it important for your teens to know how much things cost? So they can better live by the prophets’ counsel to live within their means. Often, when we overspend, we are not practicing discipline, which is an important characteristic that can be developed through learning how much things cost, budgeting, and tracking spending.
I have several suggestions to share today about how to help your teen learn to estimate costs more accurately. I want you to be open to ideas beyond my suggestions that come to you as you listen. Maybe there is an idea that will come to you from the Spirit that is perfect for your family that has nothing to do with any of the suggestions I give in this episode.
Suggestion #1: Take your teenager grocery shopping. You could even give them responsibility for a few days of meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking. Learning the cost of food, how to plan meals to save money and waste less food, and how to cook are necessary life skills. This can also become a math lesson!
Suggestion #2: Be more open about your finances. My parents have tried to be open about their finances throughout my life, because their parents were not. Because their parents were not open about their finances, my parents did not know what they were doing and have struggled through the process of figuring it out. They don’t want me to have that same experience.
While being open about our finances, we want to maintain some boundaries. Here are some suggestions.
Discuss with your children know what is going on in age appropriate ways and information that they will understand. They might not need to know every detail of every penny that is spent and what it is spent on. However, letting them know when there is a month that everyone needs to make some sacrifices to keep the family out of debt might be appropriate.
Counsel together. As we talked about last week, children, and really people in general, are more open to changes and working with what you are trying to do when they are in on the decision-making process. Be open to asking your children for their thoughts and considering their ideas.
Also remember, you are the parent, so you get the final say.
Suggestion #3: Teach your teenager how to fill up the car with gas, so they know how to do it and can see how much gas costs, as well as the fluctuations in price. You could even make it a game and have everyone guess how much it will cost each time you fill up. Whoever is closest wins! Keeping track of fuel costs can also help, because we all know trying to remember prices and price changes over a long period of time is difficult.
Suggestion #4: Plan a family vacation and give your teenager responsibility over the budget for one aspect of the trip. Have them calculate and estimate the cost and then after the trip see how close they were.
Suggestion #5: Play “The Price is Right” with common things you buy.
As always, if you and your teen are ready to take the first steps to becoming self-reliant and start living an abundant life, sign up for my free download, “20 Best Jobs for Latter-day Saint Teens.”
See you in the next episode!