Big concepts, little people

In my last post I talked about beginning to plant seeds of big concepts in little minds. Hopefully the concepts will help mold the little one’s perspective as they grow. With contracts the concept is that when you agree on something with someone and put it in writing (or verbal) that you need to live up to your end of the deal (Proverbs 15:4).

The next major concept I’m working on is being the lender and not the borrower (Proverbs 22:7 “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.”). Sara gets a weekly allowance of $3. To help her understand allocation of assets we gave her 3 envelopes; one for charity, one for savings, one for spending. Each week $1 goes into each envelope.

Over time and through birthdays and Christmas she has accumulated quite a bit of money in her spending envelope. As any kid would do she’s thinking about what she wants to buy with all of that cash.

Meanwhile, I set up an investment account for the girls that we put a little bit of money in for them and buy various stocks and mutual funds. I’ve particularly focused on the ones that pay dividends monthly so the girls can see activity in their accounts every month.

So as Sara is day dreaming about how to spend her money, we also talk about what happens when we let people borrow our money. If we let someone borrow $10 for a little while they have to pay back $10 plus a little extra, so we may get back $10 and $.10 – then we have more to spend or to lend to someone else. Then I show her the investment account where we “loaned” money to companies and they pay us a few dollars every month.

I don’t believe that we drill these big concepts in too hard but every once in a while when the opportunity presents itself, we go over the concepts. Hopefully, when Sara gets older and earns a fist full of dollars, she will consider that there is more that she can do with the cash than simply spend it or stash it under her mattress. If she understands Proverbs 22:7, she will have more freedom in her life than most of her friends.