While scouring the internet this morning, I found an article on a great new tool for parents to help their children learn personal financial responsibilities.
Today’s article is “This Video Game Could Rescue Your Finances”
Brief summary: Author George Mannes and his son tested a new online video game designed to teach children and teenagers personal financial responsiblities.
Okay, so the object of the game is to collect tokens in the air. In Debt Ski (the name of this game), you are playing the character of a pig on a personal watercraft. The tokens are money (for the most part), or things you spend money on: Necessities, like food etc., that you are required to obtain and desires/luxury items like TVs etc. that give you “happiness points” when you pick them up. The cool thing is that the luxury items cost you some of that money you pick up (thankfully the video game is mirroring real life, for once). You pay for them at the end of the round, with cash or credit. At first, I had a problem with the game having the credit card option, but luckily, the credit cards count as debt, and if your debts outweigh your money, your happiness points count against you.
The point of the game is to score as many points as possible, which you get by multiplying your net worth (money minus debt) by your happiness points. This is a good thing if you have more money than debt, but if, like above, you have more debt then money, all of those happiness points count against you (which also mirrors real life). Another fun point…if you don’t buy enough necessities, you automatically lose the game, because, like real life, you have to have basic necessities before you have luxury items. Side note: Health insurance counts as a necessity. If you have a big screen TV and no health insurance, you need to reevaluate your priorities.
Overall, I think this could be a very good tool for a parent to begin teaching their children how to be responsible with money. We all know that the country is in financial trouble (at least I hope we do), but to fix the problem we have to start at home. Not only do we, as adults, need to rethink what we have been doing at home with our money, but we need to make sure that we are teaching our children the NEW THINGS we are learning (i.e. savings are good, debt is bad), because if they learn the bad habits that got us into financial trouble, they will fall into the same financial trap!
