Written by So watching our daughter learn to draw has been very rewarding and being present when she learns a new ability is extremely delightful. Unfortunately for that learning is starting to come with a cost to our pockets, because along with teaching her about persistence and practise makes perfect we are also trying to help her learn about money, how to earn it and how to hold on to it as Money=Freedom in that having capital means you can make decisions more freely in your adult life.
Did we pay for this picture? no I copied it and have used it here without permission due to the benefits of the electronic age??
I think about our Children now who will not have the sorts of jobs that we have or had, our careers are or have been predominately working for one organisation at a time, with a desk, in an office where we spent most of our work day, 5 days a week.
Business is discovering the saving that can be made from not having as many/any offices because for many roles individual performance is easily calculated without a manager spending time watching that their staff are sitting at their desks, arriving on time in the morning and not leaving before a set time in the afternoon – which by the way is a terrible way to evaluate employee productivity.
This is already happening in a big way due in part to Covid-19 to be more mixed office and work from home and in the next few years the “working from home” component is only going to become more prevalent and with this, side gigs and part time work is an inevitable result; as we are already not working for the firm when we are in the office 8 hours a day anyway!
Our children will have ways of making money that we as Gen (X, Y, and maybe Z/00s) or Boomers can not even comprehend; even now my eldest son makes money through free-lance gigs, blogging, product reviews, crypto- currency, Crypto Mining etc etc, method that were unheard of when I was his age.
Considering that this is the likely scenario for our children now how do we help prepare them for a world that we will only partly understand?
My conclusion is that we as parents need to teach the fundamentals today that will provide our children with the best chance of success as adults, that starts with teaching them how to value money and not spend where it is not going to provide them with a very real benefit and this is hard because everything that they are exposed to on devices is about spending small amounts of money on a reoccurring basis to be “cool”.
Our children every day are faced with Micro-transactions whether it be within the games they play or the YouTube videos they watch, through to purchasing using Afterpay or Zip Pay; this is much the same for companies and individuals where everything become Subscription based transactions, we own nothing and continue to pay out for services because it has been imposed on us.
Instead of buying Nitro for Discord @$99, use the money to build for the future and have that security that I wished I had been able to experience 10 years ago.