She asked me once why we don’t just tap the card for more toys if it works every time at the checkout. That was the moment, more than any birthday or any “she’s old enough now” feeling, that made me think we should probably start on the money stuff properly instead of just handing over pocket money and hoping.
Three jars, and an argument about the third one
Save, spend, give. Three jars on the kitchen bench, because a single piggy bank was never going to teach the part that’s actually hard, which is choosing between things.
She picked a Switch game as the savings goal and printed a picture of it to stick on the jar, which did more work than I expected. She wanted to skip the giving jar entirely though and put everything toward the game, and we didn’t push it, we just left the jar sitting there empty. A school fundraiser note came home in week two and she put two dollars in herself, unprompted. I don’t think that would’ve happened if we’d made her do it from the start.
MoneySmart has a proper version of the needs-versus-wants stuff if you want something more structured than three jars and a vague hope, we just didn’t start there.
The pretend shop, briefly, became a scam
Twenty minutes, that’s what this was supposed to take. Empty cereal boxes and milk bottles as stock, masking tape price tags, her as shopkeeper.
Ten minutes in she’d priced an empty Weet-Bix box at fifty dollars “because it’s rare.” Not wrong, exactly, but not the lesson either. We reset the prices and I swapped her old plastic till money for real coins, because working out change from an actual two dollar coin is nothing like sliding a plastic token across a counter.
Woolies did some of the teaching for me
Give her an actual job in the trolley and she pays attention in a way she doesn’t when I’m just talking at her. So we started asking her to find the little unit price on the shelf label, the cost per hundred grams, and compare two brands.
That number isn’t decoration either. Supermarkets over a certain size have to display it by law under the Unit Pricing Code, so it’s not a gimmick, it’s a genuinely reliable thing to teach comparison shopping with. She worked out the bigger pasta box was actually worse value per gram and was insufferably proud of herself about it for the rest of the shop. Now we ask “need or want” out loud before the checkout about whatever’s landed in the trolley that wasn’t on the list. It’s stuck, mostly.
Handing over the actual number instead of the lecture afterwards
We used to tell her after a day out that it cost too much. Now we hand her a rough number before we go and let her plan around it.
One Saturday, a hundred dollars for the whole day. Zoo tickets, roughly what petrol and lunch would run to, whether there’d be enough left for ice cream after. Tickets ran a bit over budget and packing sandwiches instead of buying lunch was her idea, not a rule from us. That’s the difference I actually wanted, her working it out rather than being told.
If you’re planning further out than a single day, we’ve written about how to maintain a family budget, and separately what vacation care actually costs state by state, which tends to be the bigger number people forget to plan for.
Standing at the bank counter fumbling the interest explanation
We opened a CommBank Youthsaver account, one of the fee-free kids’ accounts the big banks do. Mostly I wanted the conversation it forces.
Explaining that the bank pays you extra just for leaving money there is harder to say out loud than I expected, standing at the counter with her watching me. A mate of ours who’s an accountant in Melbourne reckons the account-opening bit is the one step most parents skip and the one that matters most. What actually worked was checking the balance together once a month afterwards. Seeing the number go up on a week she hadn’t touched it did more than my explanation did.
The tap-and-go conversation we’d been avoiding
A card doesn’t look like it’s spending anything, and Australia’s cashless enough now that kids barely see the alternative. So we started saying it out loud at the checkout: that tap is real money, the same money we worked for, there’s less of it now than five minutes ago.
Feels stupid saying it to an adult. Not obvious at all to a kid who’s only ever seen numbers change on a screen. In-game purchases work the same way now, if she wants a skin it comes out of her own spending jar.
Two weeks isn’t enough to raise a financially literate adult, obviously. But she now argues with me about unit prices at Woolies, which is more than I expected from any of this.