As often happens, I learn great lessons about money listening to my clients share their money stories with me. Here’s a story I had to share.

  A few weeks ago, I was on the phone having a client meeting with Ben and Lois. We were talking about money and how similar or different Ben’s relationship to money is than his fathers. After discovering the many differences, it was the one major similarity that piqued my interest.

Ben and Lois have twin four and-a-half year old’s.  Each child has 3 piggy banks. One bank is marked saving, the other bank is marked spending and the other bank is marked giving. Just like Ben’s father Alex did every night he came home from work, Ben takes his spare change from the day out of his pocket, divides the change in half, and gives each child their share of the coins.

The one uncompromising rule in the family is that you have to feed all three piggy banks equally. At the end of the year, the kids get to spend the money from the spending bank on fun stuff, learn about saving money and the value of saving from the saving bank and decide how to give the money to worthy causes or people from the giving bank.

The twins love dogs and especially their dog, so last year, Lois counted up all their change, wrote a check out to the pet shelter in their neighborhood, gave each child a check and had them hand it to the Director of the Animal Shelter. What a great lesson in giving at such an early age.

Money on so many levels is such a complicated topic. I’m usually knee deep in financial analysis myself during the day. Yet here’s a perfect, yet simple example of how to teach your kids values around money. Give it a try. Then one day, down the road, when I’m meeting with your children that have turned into adults, they’ll be telling me about how their parent’s had provided them with three piggy banks and the valuable lessons they learned from the experience.