Teens and Personal Finance

Thanks to the crisis in college student loan debt, seventeen states are now requiring high school students to complete a course in personal finance and money management. While we applaud these efforts to instill in teens one of the most basic life skills, we want to remind parents that they, too, need to be teaching kids how to handle and manage their money. We live in a world where our kids are encouraged to see themselves as privileged and entitled. They believe that the accumulation of things brings happiness. This leads to patterns in reckless spending. As Christian parents, our responsibility is to teach our kids that as Psalm 24:1 says, “The earth and everything in it belong to the Lord.” We learn in Proverbs 3:9 that we are to honor the Lord with our possessions. God owns everything and we are simply stewards. As John Wesley once said, we are to work as hard as we can to make all the money you can to save as much as you can in order to give away all that you can.