Who's teaching today's kids to balance their bank account?

Summer is almost over and parents should be worried, not about back-to-school shopping, but whether or not their children are learning how to budget, save and invest in their futures. A survey released by Visa showed that only 5 percent of adults learned about the vital life skill of money management in elementary or high school - a surprisingly low number.

The Visa survey of 1,000 cardholders also found that less than half of people (48 percent) learned about money management from their parents while 41 percent were self-taught or learned the hard way. At the same time, the survey discovered that 91 percent of respondents said they supported requiring financial education be taught in every high school in the country. Currently just fifteen states have some sort of financial education requirement for high school students.

To help combat our nation's financial illiteracy problem, Visa offers parents, students, teachers and consumers of all ages free access to an award-winning money management program called Practical Money Skills for Life.

"Improving a child's money management skills should be a top priority for parents," said personal finance expert and best-selling author Jean Chatzky. "While schools need to incorporate financial education into their lesson plans, parents also have a role to play. Learning starts in the home, so turn routine financial experiences like back-to-school shopping into educational opportunities by developing a budget with your kids."

Available at www.practicalmoneyskills.com, Practical Money Skills for Life comes complete with a "Back-to-School Budget Calculator," an effective, hands-on tool to teach kids how to prepare a budget and spend wisely. The site also contains three new allowance calculators designed to help parents get a better grip on their kids' spending habits while simultaneously giving their children a solid money management foundation based on the following factors: what parents themselves received for an allowance as children, needs-based expenses versus discretionary spending, and saving for a goal.

Practical Money Skills for Life also helps give educators the tools they need to reinforce this learning in their classrooms. With complete lesson plans tailored for grades K-12 and beyond, the website includes presentation materials, in-class activities, quizzes and more mapped to state educational standards.

Some key back-to-school shopping tips include:

Have children follow a budget. Stress that getting a more expensive item might mean sacrificing something else.

Encourage kids to consider ways to cut costs and manage cash flow, like clipping coupons, looking for sales, or buying supplies each semester.

Teach your kids to comparison shop to avoid impulse buying or paying for overpriced items.

Differentiate between "needs" and "wants." Ask children to contribute their own money to fill the gap between what they "need" and what they "want."

Tell kids that if they come in under budget, you will split the savings with them.

Continue the budgeting lesson by starting an ongoing monthly allowance for your kids.

Practical Money Skills for Life is an award-winning, teacher-tested and teacher-approved financial education program that is available in English, Spanish and Chinese. The program contains three comprehensive sections, complete with money management resources and lesson plans tailored for use at home, in the classroom or at work. It also contains an array of tips to help prepare for life changing financial events, from planning a baby to saving for college and retirement, as well as a number of other budget calculators and interactive games. Visa also runs What's My Score (www.whatsmyscore.org),a leading higher education consumer awareness program. The website guides college students through the ABC's of a FICO credit score, from factors that can lower a score to ways on improving it, at no charge.

Additionally, building on a decade-long commitment to improving the financial literacy of all Americans, Visa USA has joined with Chatzky to promote financial literacy nationwide. Through this collaboration, Chatzky is helping to develop new financial education curriculum and interactive resources geared toward teachers, students, women and parents. She has and will continue to participate in a number of Practical Money Skills for Life and What's My Score outreach activities.

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Firozali A Mulla , 16 August 2007 @ 12:53 PM  Who's teaching today's kids to balance their bank account? Who's teaching today's kids to balance their bank account? Globalization has failed. Sir When I read the books on “The Death of Economics: Books: by Paul Ormerod ... all the ego driven, engineering models, that bore people to death of economics. ... Death of Economics , Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets: by Joanna Blythman ... 'Shopped' takes the reader on a lively, thought ... Shopped, the super pier of the supermarkets , The World is Flat Thomas L. Friedman Chances are good that Bhavya in Bangalore will read your next x-ray, or as Thomas Friedman learned first hand, "Grandma Betty in The imaginative and, above all, practical vision for a successful and equitable world, Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work , I see all the controversies diluted . Let me elaborate. The authors have written these books having the rich countries in mind. They do understand that the poor countries do not count as the super power makes the coins roll. Hence they have always harped on the poor countries as the third grade states and never giving any remedies to these countries. The result is now in Tanzania where this letter comes from, The central, Bank Of Tanzania, wants to Commercial banks to deposits of one trillion into the BoT In other term the central bank has no liquidity and begs the commercial bank. This is reported in the local papers CITIZEN ISSN 0856-9754 no 908 A local paper managed by the Nation Media of Kenya. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD P.O.Box 6044 Dar-Es-salaam Tanzania East Africa

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Firozali A Mulla , 16 August 2007 @ 12:51 PM  Who's teaching today's kids to balance their bank account? Who's teaching today's kids to balance their bank account? Sir I do not understand the question when the great are faltering, how can I teach the children? The problem with Microsoft is exactly like what is happening in India or call this the new Silicon Valley. Like the California outsourcing too much one time it ran off the rails and fell down on the knees. Let me elaborate. California IT corporations found that India and China was the cheap labor world for the manufacturing of the components and cheap labor would save the corporations of having cheaper software and hardware. What happened was India and China now lead and California glittering valley that was the IT valley is no more there and has shifted to Bangalore India and Shanghai, China respectively. The diminishing returns showed that you cannot carry on having profits. Now India is filing the tax returns of the American businessmen from India as the time difference is their favor. One accountant to who know the laws of USA revenue authorities can fill the forms on behalf of many by simply passing the information to thousands in India who are eagerly waiting to file the tax returns forms on behalf of the American tax payers. Microsoft has had similar problems since going to the court. It challenges the virus writers to puncture the program and the hackers oblige Microsoft by breaking the codes. Microsoft is big but most venerable to the virus writers as the hackers want to create the name. This will carry on for as long as OS is really crash proof. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla MBA PhD P.O.Box 6044 Dar-Es-salaam Tanzania East Africa