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2024

Milton the Money Savvy Pup Brings Home The Bacon (Book Review)

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Milton the Money Savvy Pup: Brings Home the Bacon
Can Milton teach your kids about money one treat at a time? Yes!

I’ve covered a lot of the best kids money books and it’s time to add Milton the Money Savvy Pup to the list. The first book in the short two-book series is when he brings home the bacon.

This children’s book follows the adventures of Milton, an adorable corgi with a passion for learning about money – and bacon, of course!

The Story Behind Milton

Jamie Bosse, a financial planner and mother of four children, created Milton based on her real-life experiences teaching kids about money. Milton is actually the family’s corgi. The combination of a cute dog and money lessons is a winning formula for keeping young kids engaged.

The Plot

Milton is a hungry dog and is just starting to learn about money. What coins does he need to get the bacon and how can he earn them? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Throughout the story, Milton learns several key financial concepts:

  • The importance of saving coins and dollars
  • How to make smart choices with money
  • The value of delayed gratification (even when it comes to tasty bacon treats!)

What Makes This Book Different

There are plenty of children’s books about money out there, but Milton the Money Savvy Pup stands out for several reasons:

  1. Relatable Character: Kids naturally connect with Milton. Who doesn’t love a cute corgi learning about money? The fact that he’s motivated by treats makes the concept of saving for goals very relatable to young readers.
  2. Natural Learning Flow: The financial lessons don’t feel forced. They’re woven naturally into Milton’s daily adventures, making them easier for kids to understand and remember.
  3. Beautiful Illustrations: The illustrators did a fantastic job bringing Milton to life. The artwork is engaging and helps keep young readers interested in the story while reinforcing the money concepts being taught.

Age Appropriateness

Amazon says this book is for kids up to age 11, but I would say it’s best for kids ages 4-7. At the younger side, children will love Milton’s personality and the colorful illustrations. The older kids will be able to grasp the concept of working and saving up for something that is truly valued.

If you are looking for books for kids in the 9-12 range, I would go with Grandpa’s Fortune Fables or The Golden Quest

Building a Financial Future

What I particularly appreciate about this book is how it introduces the foundation for important money conversations. Rather than just focusing on basic concepts like counting coins, it helps children understand that money management is a skill they can master – just like Milton does.

Read Along

The author has a read along of Milton the Money Savvy Pup Brings Home The Bacon on YouTube. Give it a watch:

Final Thoughts

Milton the Money Savvy Pup succeeds where many financial literacy books for kids fall short – it makes learning about money fun and memorable. The combination of an engaging story, lovable character, and solid money lessons makes this book a valuable addition to any family’s library.

The only minor drawback is that your kids might start asking for a corgi after reading it! But if that means they’re also asking to start saving money and developing good financial habits, it might be worth considering.

Looking to build your child’s financial literacy library? Milton brings home the bacon is a great way to start. Just don’t be surprised if bacon treats become your new reward system for good money habits!

Would you like more book reviews about teaching kids about money? Check out our complete library of children’s money book reviews here.

Brian MacFarland has reached more than 10 million people on his personal finance journey to financial independence.  He’s been featured in the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and Lifehacker.

Read more on the About page.

If you enjoyed this article please Support Kid Wealth

Seven Best Money Starts for Kids

Leave a Comment / Money Smart Kids / By

Recently, a friend of mine and I were comparing notes about how to best give our kids a head start with their money. He’s not just an ordinary friend, but he’s running Youth Entrepreneur Summit. That’s proof that he knows his stuff.

Since I was already thinking about the steps we’ve taken, I figured I might as well make them a blog post. I know it has been a while since I’ve written a blog post, so as a reminder, the boys are now ten and 11 years old.

Here are my seven…

Best Money Starts for Kids

(Roughly in order of importance.)

1. Education

I always tell kids that school is job 1. Get good grades, make good friends, but most importantly, just try your best. So far, so good. They each have their individual strengths and weaknesses, like all people, but they are checking off this box. I emphasize “checking” because I remind them that:

“Success is never owned. It is rented. The rent is due every day.”

I don’t have to spend any other words explaining how a good education can lead to better careers, do I?

2. Core Financial Education

I teach kids about money in several different ways: television, books, online courses, and even video games. Here’s a great list for all those resources. When it comes to books, here are my recommendations for Best Kids’ Money Books. I have quite a few sorted by age and specialty so that you can pick the best books for you.

The most important thing to do is teach kids compound interest.

3. Allowance w/Debit Card

I believe that giving an allowance is one of the best ways to teach kids about money. This is why I created a whole portal of articles about allowances.

Specifically, one of the best things I’ve ever done was set up my kids with a Famzoo debit card. You can read my Famzoo Review here. It was too difficult for me to remember to pay them every week, and I never had the right denominations of cash. This automated the process, and the kids are great at learning their cards and using the app to know how much they have.

Most parents are so confused when their kids use their debit cards. One time, a 9-year-old (at the time) took out his debit card and bought his friend a small ice cream while they were on a play date with another parent.

4. Teach them to Become Entrepreneurs

You can’t beat the old-fashioned lemonade stand to teach kids about money. They’ll value a dollar a lot more when they earn it. Learning how to run a business will help them throughout their whole lives, even if it’s not a core part of their career.

I create a portal with a bunch of articles about how to teach kids to become entrepreneurs.

5. Set Up a Brokerage Account and Invest

When my kids were really young, around 3 and 4, I opened brokerage accounts for them. By that time, they had a decent amount of birthday money from aunts and uncles. They didn’t need it to buy stuff because we spoiled them with more toys than they could ever play with.

At the time, interest rates were close to 0%. In the last seven years, they’ve doubled their money. Nowadays, they care more about spending that birthday money than investing it. Nonetheless, they now have several extra thousand dollars compounding away. It’s money they’ve never missed.

6. Credit Card Authorized Users

Around the same time that I created those brokerage accounts, I added them as authorized users to our Amazon Prime Credit Card. They have credit cards that they don’t even know about.

Why would I do this? To credit card companies, it looks like they are being responsible users of credit. That builds their credit history. Hopefully, they won’t need credit for a long time, but when they do, this simple step will come in handy. Compared to everything else on this list, it’s a quick and free head start that could pay off for years.

7. Kid Roth IRA

My kids have helped me with our home-based dog boarding business. It’s only fair that I pay them for their work. When kids earn money from a job (not from an allowance, but a real business), they can open up a Roth IRA. There are no special rules for kids. Anyone can contribute to a Roth IRA – as long as they have earned income. It’s the “earned income” that’s hard for kids because most can’t get a job until they are 15 or 16 years old. (Those pesky child labor laws!)

It may take some effort to figure out, but if you can manage it, a kid Roth IRA can be worth millions. There are two very important factors at play:

  1. A REALLY long time of compound interest. When you start to learn about compound interest, you’ll wish that you started earlier. It’s hard to start earlier than being a kid. Perhaps they won’t have to save for retirement at all.
  2. They don’t have to pay taxes on the growth of the Roth IRA. That’s very important because, normally, investment gains are taxed.

Final Thoughts

A lot of young adults are in a tough financial place nowadays. They have high student loans and health insurance premiums, and the cost of housing (renting or buying) is off the charts.

The best way to prepare them for this world is to set them up with a few of these “money starts.”

Brian MacFarland has reached more than 10 million people on his personal finance journey to financial independence.  He’s been featured in the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and Lifehacker.

Read more on the About page.

If you enjoyed this article please Support Kid Wealth

Avoid The Stock Market Game

Leave a Comment / Kid Wealth News / By
Stock Market Game
Stock Market Game

We need to talk about the Stock Market Game.

Well, I need to write about it. There is something very wrong with the Stock Market Game.

However, before that, let’s get everyone up to speed.

What is the Stock Market Game?

The Stock Market Game is an educational tool designed to teach students about the stock market. Participants engage in a simulated trading environment where they buy and sell stocks, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) using virtual money. Virtual money allows them to gain valuable experience without risking real money.

History of the Stock Market Game?

The Stock Market Game started in the late 1970s to promote financial literacy among kids. Over the years, it has evolved into a widely adopted educational program, reaching schools and colleges all over the world.

How Does the Stock Market Game Work?

Students use one hundred thousand dollars in virtual money on the Stock Market Game website to invest in stocks. It’s very realistic, which can help them learn how to use a brokerage platform using real money later in life.

Students learn stock tickers and how to place market and limit orders. They can work by themselves or in groups of up to five. The goal is to make the most money. The game lasts between 10 and 15 weeks. (It seems that the teacher may configure this, or different regions have different lengths.)

The Problem with Stock Market Game

A stock market simulation sounds like a fun way to learn a practical skill, right?

Unfortunately, it has one ginormous problem: The Stock Market Game encourages kids to invest recklessly.

Over a short period, a well-diversified ETF such as the S&P 500 Index or a Wilshire 5000 Index will never win the stock market game. Over a decade or more, the same well-diversified ETF will outperform nearly 90% of professionally managed funds.

In the Stock Market Game, there will always be a kid who got lucky on the first day trading some of the recent hot stocks. The kid could then sell and stay at the top of the leaderboard. Other kids who didn’t get lucky will probably lose money. They’ll make more risky bets at that point because that’s their only hope of winning.

Kids could lose 80% of their virtual money, and it wouldn’t matter. If they lose the game by $10, it’s the same if they lose it by $90,000. They weren’t planning to buy real cars or houses or save for retirement with it. In real life, turning $100,000 into $110,000 with minimal risk is rewarded with the ability to spend $10,000. In real life, losing $90,000 may mean working much longer than planned.

The Stock Market Game could do much better by teaching kids the investing basics of asset allocation and buy-and-hold (for years). It’s like giving kids a couple of games of Super Mario Cart as a test for their driver’s license. No one has ever played Super Mario Cart to complete the race safely.

Is The Stock Market Game a Scam?

I’ll let you be the judge, but Allan S. Roth, MBA, CPA, CFP® makes a good case in my opinion:

“Why would SIFMA want to teach maximizing risk? SIFMA stands for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. Well, over half of its 520 members are broker-dealers. The SMG provides great benefit to those broker-dealers. If students do well in the game, they could take away the lesson that investing is easy and become a day trader. If they do poorly, they might learn the opposite lesson and believe that picking stocks is so difficult that they need to hire a broker to buy individual securities.

I view the SMG as yet another version of the financial services industry’s game of ‘heads we win; tails we win more.'”

Andy Hallam, a former teacher, has this to say:

Stock market games reinforce bad behaviours while crushing the good ones.

Nothing else in education is so inherently backward.

What’s better than the Stock Market Game?

I recommend reading Investing for Kids or visiting our Investing landing page (which is still under development). Another great resource is the MoneyTime Kids course.

Kids will learn a lot more if you let them make their own mistakes on a small scale.

Brian MacFarland has reached more than 10 million people on his personal finance journey to financial independence.  He’s been featured in the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and Lifehacker.

Read more on the About page.

If you enjoyed this article please Support Kid Wealth

Five Ways to Teach Compound Interest

Leave a Comment / Elementary Money, Investing, Teen Money, Tween Money / By
Teach Compound Interest
Look at the difference between compound interest and simple interest!

“My wealth has come from a combination of living in America, some lucky genes, and compound interest”
– Warren Buffett

When one of the richest people on the Earth gives actionable advice that anyone can take it’s worth listening to. He’s used the magic of compound interest better than anyone.

Here are four fun ways to teach compound interest to kids:

  1. Read A Book About Compound Interest

    My third grader did a play at school called One Grain of Rice. We had read the book earlier this year.

    One Grain of Rice is a lesson on how a grain of rice doubled every day for a month becomes a huge number – enough to bankrupt a kingdom. Substitute a penny for the grain of rice and there will be enough money to fill a mountain!

    Read my One Grain of Rice article here. It has an interactive spreadsheet, which illustrates it better than a compound interest calculator in my opinion.

  2. Use a Graph

    There’s a classic example of the power of compound interest that compares two investors. The younger person invests for a few years and then stops after 10 years. The slightly older person invests for 30 years and still can’t match the younger one. Here’s a graph of what that looks like:

  3. Give Kids Firsthand Experience

    You can read books about fixing cars or programming computers. Reading is not the same as doing.

    In The First National Bank of Dad (Review), I learned a technique where kids are given monthly interest payments on their deposits. Shorter compounding periods help kids notice the money growing faster. This creates an incentive to save more.

    For example, a 3% monthly interest rate is an annual 42% interest rate. It’s something that many parents can do because kids don’t have $100,000 of principal to break the bank.

    You may think that putting kids’ money in a traditional savings account is a great choice. However, the interest earnings are so low it will take them the rest of their lives to earn much. It’s no way to show how the rewards of compound interest are often described as the eighth wonder of the world.

  4. Watch a Video About How Compound Interest Works

    This video explains how the above works with a 10% monthly interest rate. It also illustrates how compound interest works over a lifetime:

    While the video says it is geared to grades 5-8, I think it works for grade 3 and maybe even some second graders. The multiplication at the beginning is the most difficult part, but it’s very quick and kids don’t have to follow the math exactly to get it.

  5. Take A Course
    MoneyTime is a course to teach kids about money in general. It covers much more than compound interest. MoneyTime has some gaming features like allowing kids to create their own avatar.

Teaching compound interest to kids is especially useful because they have more time to grow their money. The video above showed how much of a difference there is between an 18 and a 25-year-old saving over time. Imagine if you can start even seven years before the video’s example.

Parts of this article were originally published July 8, 2022

Brian MacFarland has reached more than 10 million people on his personal finance journey to financial independence.  He’s been featured in the Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and Lifehacker.

Read more on the About page.

If you enjoyed this article please Support Kid Wealth

Kid Wealth is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. I am not a financial adviser. Kid Wealth content is for educational purposes only and the information should not be construed as professional financial advice.

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