Some lessons we only seem to learn the hard way. Chief among them is learning the value and importance of sitting beforehand and thinking through what you’re about to do. In finance, we call this budgeting.

Benjamin Franklin famously said that if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. Not that everything ever happens according to plan, but rather the time you took in planning gives you an idea of what you would like to happen which can help you react when you pick up things are going wrong.

So in order to distil this valuable habit of planning in our children, we would like to involve you in the process. Our new budget feature is an invitation to sit down with your children, and talk through what they plan to spend in the next month, or just a week if their attention span doesn’t extend to a month just yet. Come up with a budget together, write it down and then use our budget feature to track if they manage to stay within their budget.

Planning ahead and proactively preparing for what is to come is an undeniably useful habit to adopt throughout your life, but especially so in regard to your finances. And with all habits, the best time to start forming them is ten years ago, the second best time is right now. Help your children form this habit and plan to rejoice in watching them succeed.