Today’s article is something a little different – something light to send you into the weekend. Yes, it’s another example of teaching your kids about money with television. What if we could take a kids’ song and make it into a money lesson? I didn’t set out to make this happen. However, spending a lot of time with kids and thinking about personal finance often leads to odd combinations.
Or to put it another way, “Something weird might just be something familiar viewed from a different angle.”
My kids love Adventure Time and it’s good for adults to watch as well. Somewhere along the line, I couldn’t follow the story (it’s very weird). However, I enjoyed the songs, particularly the ones from Marceline (Olivia Olson), so I got the soundtrack for the kids. That’s when one song caught my attention in the car. I would later find out that it made the an LA Times list of top songs that make you cry.
Watch this short 90-second “Everything Stays” from the Cartoon Network show Adventure Time:
In case you aren’t able to watch here are some of the lyrics: (It’s much more meaningful in the full context with the music.)
“Everything stays right where you left it Everything stays But it still changes Ever so slightly, daily and nightly In little ways, when everything stays”
Isn’t that a tremendous description of buy-and-hold investing? Your shares stay, but there are slight daily changes to the value of the shares.
“Go down to the ocean The crystal tide is raising waters’ gotten higher as the shore washes out Keep your eyes wide open, even when the sun is blazin’ The moon controls the tide, it can cause you to drown”
This quote reminds me of watching the warning signs when you own a stock. The last line about the moon controlling the tide is a reminder that the fate of a stock is often out of your hands once you’ve made the decision to buy.
Index funds don’t require you to keep your eyes open. The moon rarely can cause few diversified portfolios to drown.
What did you think? Was this something too weird or familiar when looked at from a different angle? Let me know in the comments.
I have two boys, one in the second grade and one in the first grade. My second grader is doing basic math with money at school, things like making change correctly. It’s certainly a good start, it is math disguised as adding and subtracting tens and twenty-fives. My kids learn more about personal finance when I take them shopping and show them how I compare unit pricing on a jar of spaghetti sauce. For the most part, I should be focusing on how to give your child an allowance.
Alas, two of my greatest interests in life are personal finance and my kids… I would inevitably try to combine the two. I can’t teach all personal finance through television. So when I heard that MoneyTime was an online class for teaching kids personal finance, I did a little research and reached out to them to find out more. Every week, I get a dozen or more companies asking me to pitch their product or service. This was one of the few times that I’ve reached out to the company. (You may have noticed that I review very few services.)
MoneyTime Review: The Overview
MoneyTime is designed for kids between the ages of 10 to 14. From their FAQ:
“We’ve found after testing that children below 10 years old found the math to be a little too complex and those above 14 found the graphics of the game to be too childish. That’s why this age range is perfect for MoneyTime.”
My 8-year-old is in challenge math classes at school, so I figure it was worth a shot. All year, he’s been getting extra instruction in school about how to work with computers just in case they have to go to home-schooling. That proved very helpful in getting him going with the basics of navigating the application. They were right about the math though. Early on, there were some multiplication questions. Armed with his Multiplication Machine, he was ready to go. I was always nearby, but he only called on me a couple of times. If I wasn’t a personal finance blogger (and a Tiger Dad) curious to push the age limits, I would wait until age 10 for the kid to get the most out of the classes.
The MoneyTime system is broken up into 8 major topics:
Topic 1: Earning, saving and interest
Topic 2: Employment
Topic 3: Managing your money
Topic 4: Borrowing money
Topic 5: Property
Topic 6: Investing
Topic 7: Business
Topic 8: Protecting your money
Each of those topics is broken up into 4-6 modules or lessons. For example, “Managing your money” has modules of Smart Spending, Budgeting, Banking, and Paying. I’m not sure that a 10-year-old needs to consider employment in topic 2, especially the “resume” module. However, I think it’s based on the outline of “earn, save, invest” in that order.
My son completed the first topic, so this review will be based only on that section. The lower right-hand part of the dashboard gives you a little view on how that went:
If you read from the bottom up, you can see my son got only 67% of the pre-test questions on earning, saving, and investing correct. I was very impressed by this pre-test because had little exposure to some of the topics. I had to remind him a couple of times that he wasn’t expected to know the answers. I used this opportunity to teach him how to eliminate some answers that seemed obviously wrong and then take his best guess of what’s left.
After a module of instruction, there is a 10 question quiz. He got 60%, 90%, and 80% respectively on the earn, save, invest sections. The invest section introduced the difference of compound interest vs. simple interest – a distinction he still talks about today. When it came to the final review test on the topic of saving, earning, investing, he scored a 93%. I expected some improvement because he was learning the material on the test, but this was outstanding.
MoneyTime Keeps Kids Motivated
You may have noticed that my son has an avatar of a weird orange bird superhero. He likes fire-type Pokemon and my theory is that this most closely resembled Blaziken – the fire chicken.
You can spend your earnings (which come from completing modules) on improving your avatar. This was an important motivation for my 8-year-old. He also made investments in education (the stack of books) and investments (the treasure chest). The education helps him earn more as he completes more modules, he’ll earn more. This seems to be a little like the game of life where having a good career helps you earn more from the “Pay Day” spots on the board. His current job as a “trainer” earns $1000 a year. His $5,500 savings is enough to upgrade to Carpenter that would give him a 50% raise per year ($1500).
It’s not clear to me how years pass in this world, but I think it’s because we stopped where we did. My son did one topic (the three modules) over two days during school break. He hasn’t gone back to it since then. I don’t think it is because MoneyTime didn’t have the staying power. Instead, my kids simply don’t have a lot of time with school/homework/karate/cub scouts/etc. I want them to have some unstructured time as well. We should revisit it over the summer. He’ll have more free time and be almost 9 then.
MoneyTime Review: The Conclusion
I gave you our experience with MoneyTime, but I think the company’s professionally-made, less than 90-second, video shows off a little more from a different perspective. It’s worth the quick watch:
There are a couple of online courses for kids and personal finance, but this is the first one I’ve tried. It works very well. Then again, kids’ personal finance education is non-existent, so the bar is very, very low. When I think of what we spend on karate/skiing classes and specialty camps, the value of this education is way, way, off the charts.
This link will give you 25% off bringing your annual membership to $49. That price is current as of this writing (1/26/2022). They have a deal going on now. The pricing used to be $99 a year. If you think it’s something that you might be interested in, I would buy it now. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that the company will give me a commission on sales.
Does it make sense to teach kids about money with television shows? At first, it may make sense to avoid it. Some argue that kids watch too much television these days. It’s good to have limits, but I think television can be a useful tool. My opinion is, if they are going to watch television anyway, teaching kids financial literacy is a good use of that time. I’ve put together a few shows that can help form (or supplement) their financial education.
Teen Titans Go! has 7-10 episodes that cover many important personal finance lessons. Since there are more than 300 episodes of Teen Titans Go! use this guide to look up the specific episodes on Hulu.
There are very few other places where you’ll find an entertaining episode about building wealth with rental properties. One episode covers the importance of good credit history and credit score. Another episode teaches the value of money with a weird analogy of bees being the currency – a perfect starter to talk about cryptocurrency. There’s also an episode with an analogy of taking on too much student loan debt to go to the dream college instead of making the fiscally smart decision.
Warren Buffett has a cartoon teaching kids entrepreneurial lessons. There are more than twenty episodes of his group of young teens learning money lessons. It’s free to stream on Kartoon Channel at the link above. No subscription service to buy!
Decades ago, School House Rock famously taught millions of kids how a bill became a law and how parts of speech work. I don’t remember seeing their lessons about money, but my local library had a DVD that was pure gold, Schoolhouse Rock: Money.
It’s another great way to teach your kids about money with television and you can watch all 8 money lessons on YouTube! These videos aren’t the best quality.
If you have a Disney+ subscription, you can get perfect quality by looking up School House Rock and skipping to season 6 for all the money lessons. The other seasons cover a variety of different topics that are worth your time too. If you have a Disney+ subscription, look up School House Rock and skip to season 6 for all the money lessons. (While you are there check out all the other seasons.)
The short songs cover money management, economics, taxes, the national debt, investing in stocks, and dollar-cost averaging. There’s a little history of money, explaining how barter and coins work.
Cha-Ching Money Smart Kids
There’s a very complete curriculum of money education available at Cha-Ching Money Smart Kids. The lessons consist of 3-minute videos and PDFs designed for teachers (classroom activity) and parents (family activity).
Dr. Alice Wilder, the creator, is known for Blues Clues, Tumble Leaf, and Super Why, one of my favorite shows for teaching younger kids how to read. Forbes gave Cha-Ching Money Smart Kids a good review.
Shark Tank
Older kids may appreciate Shark Tank. While some topics may be boring to kids, there are quite a few episodes with kids who are entrepreneurs. My oldest saw an episode where a kid started a dog treat business that was very successful. He wanted to start cooking right away.
Biz Kid$
Biz Kid$ is a show designed to teach kids everything about personal finance. You can find some clips here. Those clips come with a lesson plan. All the lesson plans are available in English, but some are available in Spanish as well. There are a few free streaming episodes on Vimeo. Unfortunately, if you want to watch all the episodes, it is quite expensive. It seems like the pricing is geared towards school districts. Each 28-minute episode costs $5 to buy or $2 to rent. It would cost about $350 to buy all 71 episodes. You can buy a subscription to stream seasons 1-3 for $30/mo. You’d have to buy another subscription to stream seasons 4-6 for another $30/mo. So if you were really good about binge-watching 71 episodes, you could do it for $60. That’s a tall order. I haven’t taken the time to watch this series yet, but I hope to at least watch and review the free episodes soon.
The Toy Box
I’ve never seen this show, but I’ve read some interesting things about it. It sounds a little like Shark Tank where kids (and toy experts) are judges of toys. I’m not sure how much personal finance it will teach, but it sounds like it would be a fun show. You can buy each of the two seasons of The Toy Box for $15 on Amazon. I can’t seem to find it available for streaming on any major platform.
Final Thoughts on Teaching Your Kids Money with Television
There are a lot of resources out there. I think it makes sense to start with the free ones like Warren Buffett’s Secret Millionaire Club. We’ve watched most of them and, while it isn’t our kids’ most favorite show, it’s among their favorite learning shows.
