To tell you the truth, when we launched Finkeyz financial literacy program a couple of months back, the original view was to offer financial education to children over 11 years of age (6th grade onwards).
However soon we started receiving enquiries from parents whose kids were as young as 8 years. While we hesitated to enroll them initially, parents insisted and asked us to take at least a demo for their children. We agreed. We modified the program, the kids took the demo, and voila, most of them liked it. Some kids found it a bit difficult and parents chose to wait out till they were a bit older. Currently we have quite a few 8-10 year old students going about Financial Literacy.
So what is the right age to learn financial literacy?
The right answer to this question is ‘it depends’!
For kids, it would all depend upon what their parents think, what have been their life experiences. Some parents would want their children to develop money smartness early as they believe it’s a critical lifelong skill. Parents can have their kids enrol for financial literacy as soon as they think their child are old enough to understand basic arithmetic and understand the world around them a little bit. That could be 8 years or 11 years, doesn’t matter.
Let’s look at it this way: If you want a good, stress free quality of life, money should be the least of your concerns. It should all be taken care of! So lack of money skills is not really an option. The earlier a child starts, the better the power of compounding, practice and financial wisdom. By the time they’re out of college, they’re well set.
However what typically happens is parents just take it easy. They believe children will learn on their own as they step out. This is a mistake as more often than not it never really happens.
The wrong time to start learning financial literacy
We do know this for sure. The wrong time to start working upon children’s financial skills is ‘tomorrow’, or ‘later’, or ‘never’.
Unfortunately, this represents the vast majority. Most realize about their lack of financial skills only when they are in the ‘regret’ stage of life – today’s children, the adults of tomorrow, regretting not having come to grips with finance early.
Why is ‘Tomorrow’ too late for financial literacy?
As kids grow older, other pressing priorities take most of their time away. As they commence their careers, they get busy learning the ropes of the game while juggling with other facets of life. Money is flowing in and that’s all that matters at that point in time.
It’s typically only late in the day when they realize that finance could have been the most important skillset they had rather learnt. Unfortunately no one guided them, correctly.
Regret ensues.
