You’re on the job hunt, and you’re clicking send again on yet another application. You wonder: Where is this going? A black hole? We’ve all been there. It can be frustrating and disheartening to send your resume into what feels like outer space, only to refresh your inbox and find the same, standard auto-response that […]
The post 5 Ways to Get Your Resume Noticed appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
Back to school shopping doesn’t have to be just for parents or kids.
For the last few years, I’ve covered back to school shopping for TheStreet.com, and while I was neither in school nor sending a child off to one, I can almost recite by heart the list of items that get discounted around this time each year. Unfortunately for both me and my wife, some technical difficulties pressed each of us into doing some back to school shopping of our own this year.
I have had my little 13-inch white MacBook for almost a decade. It fills all my writing needs, it remains largely bug-free and, until this year, it required only a new battery every now and then. However, Apple has considered it obsolete for a while now and, this year, it began running incredibly hot and, in its final days, wasn’t responding to mouse commands.
Despite living in a tech-driven corner of Oregon, only one computer shop would take my hobbled laptop. As it turned out, the battery had swelled beyond the laptop’s casing and had bent the clickpad out of place. It came home fixed, but with a warning that even third-party companies weren’t producing batteries for it anymore.
My wife, meanwhile, had dumped her old Dell laptop into a magazine rack beside our couch and left it there do die. She’d purchased it 11 years ago for a graduate program and had it repaired multiple times by technicians at her father’s workplace. When it, too, lost battery integrity and became more buggy than she could deal with, she made do with a free tablet from our wireless provider until she could shop for another.
That’s when I remembered, after years of consulting sites like DealNews and LifeHacker, that late-summer back-to-school sales are second only to Black Friday for laptop deals. I checked Best Buy during its “Black Friday in July” sale and found a MacBook Air that sells for $999 on Apple’s site listed for $849. It wasn’t refurbished and, while it wasn’t the $699 version I could’ve received if I was a student, it was still a fine deal.
Laura, meanwhile, paid just $200 on Amazon for an updated version of the Dell Inspiron that cost her more than twice as much a decade earlier. As DealNews notes, however, last year saw Dell prices drop 11 percent between July and August, while Lenovo 11.6-inch laptops (far smaller than her 15.6-inch model) sold for about $130.
While Apple, Best Buy, and other tech retailers will restrict their best deals to card-carrying college kids or their parents, there are still deals out there for those who won’t be attending classes in the fall. According to DealNews, 31 percent of the tablet deals offered in August 2017 were among the best deals of that year.
Besides, not every sale needs a student ID card. Notebooks, pens, pencils, markers, disinfectant wipes, and more wind up on sale at Walmart and Target, often for less than a buck apiece. Staples used to not only revel in parents’ back-to-school shopping, but still slashes the prices of notebooks, pens, folders, rulers, index cards, Post-It Notes, and other items around this time each year. If you’re an adult who uses pens and paper in any capacity and you aren’t using this time of year as an excuse to go to Office Depot and stock up on stationery and other office supplies, you’re missing a pretty great opportunity for frugality.
The National Retail Federation estimates that parents will spend $82.8 billion this year amid increased consumer confidence. However, those shopping for college and beyond spend $55 billion of that total, and roughly $941 apiece. That includes more than $229 on electronics — but clothes, shoes, furniture, and home goods all go on sale as a result of college kids’ whims as well.
Summer apparel always sees a price drop around this time of year at places like the Gap, Kohl’s, JCPenney, and Old Navy, but shoes also get a back-to-school boost as Clarks, Famous Footwear, DSW, Puma, Adidas, and Tilly’s all offer deep discounts. According to DealNews, Puma and Adidas brands drop as low as $25 for adult sneakers around this time of year, while online outlets like Sperry, Shoebacca, and Foot Locker will offer discounts of 33 to 75 percent.
However, you can’t discount just how much of an effect back-to-school sales have on “filler items” like stacks of hand sanitizer, toilet paper, paper towels, and other items you see as you head toward the registers or that pop up as suggestions to get you to free shipping. This year, Target offers $15 off $50 worth of household supplies, while Walmart pushes bedding and small kitchen appliances with college kids in mind. Bed Bath & Beyond, meanwhile, built itself on offering storage containers, shelving, hangers, laundry kits, and shower items at a deep discount around this time of year.
Those big piles of sale-priced storage containers at Home Depot or Lowe’s? Those giants skids of pencils and tape at Costco? None of them require a child or a teacher’s list to pick up for yourself.
You just have to think somewhat like a college student or school parent. How much of each of these items will it take to get me through the year? How many of these do I actually go through, and is it worth getting this many to get the bulk discount? Is any of this apparel multi-seasonal? How long will it be before I actually need to buy shoes again?
Shopping for laptops during back to school season this year was just a sound reminder of the frugality behind shopping these sales when you have kids in school. You want to get as many of the best items you can at the lowest cost possible, and you want to make sure what you buy will be durable enough to get you through at least the school year.
If you can stock up on a year’s worth of clothing, office supplies, cleaning supplies, and other home goods for dorm-room prices, all while picking up a laptop that will survive a collegiate career, you’re learning one of the best lessons the start of the school year can teach.
More by Jason Notte:
The post Kids or Not, It Can Pay to Do Some Back to School Shopping for Yourself appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Swagbucks is adding new ways to earn rewards all the time. In just 20 minutes a day, I earn $100 or more per month in Swagbucks rewards. To boost your bonus earnings, check out these top ways we’ve found to increase your rewards in less time.
New to Swagbucks? Check out our complete beginner’s guide.
Swagbucks’ new trivia game, Swag IQ, lets you earn rewards for your trivia prowess.
A live trivia game every weekday allows you to win Swagbucks (SBs) for correct answers. Get all ten questions right (or buy back in with SBs when you get one wrong) and receive your share of the daily cash price. The bonus pot is typically worth over $1,100, but the prize is split between all winners.
Even if you get a question wrong, be sure to stick around! You earn SBs for each correct answer. But you do have to be signed in for the entire game for those rewards to hit your account.
Swago is Swagbucks’ digital bingo game to earn bonus rewards. These contests are weeklong challenges to complete different simple tasks within the Swagbucks platform to create specific designs on your Swago board. The more difficult the design, the more SBs you can earn.
Claim tiles by earning SBs through using the Swagbucks search engine, attempting surveys, clicking through to partner sites and activating your SwagButton browser extension. The columns with the easiest tiles on the board typically take just a minute or two, and can earn you 10 SBs. But fill up the whole board and you’ll snag 500 SBs.
Beware, however, that completing the whole board always includes buying a gift card from Swagbucks partner site, MyGiftCardsPlus. Only buy gift cards you need. Don’t create unnecessary spending to earn rewards.
You don’t need to be online to earn Swagbucks rewards. Swagbucks is partnered with thousands of local businesses to offer SB rewards on your purchases.
Connect a credit or debit card to Swagbucks so they can see your transactions. (Don’t worry: They don’t have access to make changes to your account, and they are fully secure.) Then shop at your usual local restaurants and businesses. Rewards will be automatically applied to your account.
This is one of my favorite ways to earn SBs, since I get rewards for things I’m already doing. My family’s favorite local barbecue and Chinese food restaurants are partnered with Swag Local. After linking our card, I get rewards every time we order takeout.
If you’re looking to cool off this summer, Baskin-Robbins is offering 15 SBs per dollar spent – the equivalent of 15% rewards. Keep an eye out on your account balance; it can take two to three weeks for your account to be credited.
Ever sign into Swagbucks and wonder what to do first? There are so many ways to earn SBs now, with more being added all the time. To help you focus your efforts, Swagbucks has rolled out a daily to-do list.
With eight items on the list, you earn a bonus for completing your daily activities in addition to your rewards from each task.
I like to do the Daily Watch on my phone. That way, I can run the movie trailers while I tackle the other items on the list. The Daily Poll, Daily Search and Deal of the Day just require a quick click, but completing a survey can take a few minutes.
Finishing your daily to-do list has a double benefit.
Checking off all eight items, including completing a gold survey, usually earns you enough SBs to surpass your daily earnings goal. That gets you another few bonus SBs. And who doesn’t like free money?
Chelsea Brennan is a personal finance writer focused on helping families make their money work for them. She is the founder of the blog Mama Fish Saves, and her work has been featured on Forbes, Business Insider, GoBankingRates and more.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
Marcus writes in:
I was really intrigued by your goal setting process. Could you walk me through that in more detail?
Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure what Marcus was referring to until he pointed me at this little section in my article early this week about the battle against scarcity:
In a very practical way, the most useful tool I’ve ever found for figuring out what I really valued and turning them into practical goals is the “three morning pages” journaling routine, where I sit down with a notebook and strive to fill three pages of it with whatever comes into my brain. This often turns into an exploration of what I truly care about and what I can do to manifest that in my life, which sets the stage for practical goal setting with goals that are really meaningful to me. When I have goals that are truly meaningful to me, I am strongly motivated to achieve them and I tend to hold onto the results of successful thirty day challenges if they help me move toward that goal in a real way.
I’ve written about goals before on The Simple Dollar – this article about SMART goals in personal finance is probably the best one – but all of those articles start off with the assumption that you already have some sort of goal in mind and you’re just honing it into something that will be successful.
When you step back and think about it, that’s really the fourth or fifth step in the process. A great goal doesn’t just spring out of nowhere. There’s actually a chain of things that go on before you even have any semblance of a goal, and it’s usually because of stumbles in that process that people wind up with goals that don’t really match up with what they want out of life.
So, let’s walk through all of this from the start, step by step.
A good personal goal comes from the way you live your life, nothing more, nothing less. This is the core of every good personal goal – it emerges from the patterns of your daily life.
This might seem like an obvious beginning, but many people come into goal setting without having done this. They hear about some idea pitched somewhere that appeals to them in some way and decide that this new thing they just learned about is their goal. They dive into it and then it fails, as it inevitably will.
That’s because good goals are rooted in the reality of your life and your experience and who you are as a person, and that’s different from everyone else on Earth. You can’t just wholesale take on a goal that someone else came up with because it sounds good at the moment, because it doesn’t come from you.
Live your life. Don’t pay any attention to what others say and what goals they think you should have for yourself. Live life fully, but with your eyes wide open.
That brings us to the true first step…
Eventually, we all notice something we’re not happy with in our lives. For some, this comes really easy, because we’re immensely dissatisfied with some part of our life. For others, it can be harder, as a generally content person might find it hard to find some real form of discontentment in their life.
Although I’m generally content with my life, I can name several things I’m unhappy with. I am unhappy with my weight (though I’m in a better place that I used to be). I am unhappy with my flexibility. I am unhappy with the state of organization in my office. I am unhappy with how my free time is divided up.
At this point, it’s simply noticing that there’s a problem of some kind in my life. I don’t have any sense of a goal at all, just that there’s something that’s not where I want it to be.
In my own financial journey, I could see this starting to happen about a year before my own financial meltdown. I wrote about it in my journal about nine months before things really moved into crisis mode. Right there, I was already noticing the problem, but the issue then was that I didn’t move on to the next step until things got significantly worse.
In general, once you’ve noticed something you’re unhappy with, the next step is to give it some serious thought.
Once you have a sense that there is something in your life that you’re genuinely unhappy with in a lasting way, you still shouldn’t jump straight to a goal.
A goal at this point would be just a Band-Aid on top of a serious wound. It’s a quick “fix” but it doesn’t really fix the problem in any meaningful and lasting way. The Band-Aid is likely to fall off and not help at all or even make things worse.
Instead, the best approach here is to give yourself some time to think through the problem. I use three key tools for this.
Whenever I have some spare moments in my life, like when I’m driving somewhere or I’m waiting in a line or something like that, I consciously turn my thoughts to what’s going on in my life. I think about things I’ve noticed that I’m unhappy with and I toss them around a little. (I also often visualize upcoming situations and try to come up with a great way to handle them, or replay recent situations and try to figure out how to handle them better.) In general, I’ve tuned my spare thoughts to be self-reflective in a way that I think will make me into a better all around person.
The approach I often like to use with this is what I call the “five whys.” I think about something I’m unhappy with in my life. Why am I unhappy with that aspect of my life? I spell out that reason. Well, why does that make me unhappy? And I answer that. I do this until I’ve asked “why” five times, and usually the final answer is something that’s got me a bit emotionally agitated, but it’s usually something that’s really close to the root of the problem.
This was a thought process running through my head quite a lot during my financial low point. I felt very on edge about everything, and it was through asking lots of “whys” that I was able to burrow down to the core problem, which was that I was failing my family and my own future.
Another key aspect of thinking through a problem is to study the problem in detail, discovering what others have done to successfully deal with that issue in their life and what researchers have found about good ways of addressing the problem.
For me, this usually involves checking out many books from the library and reading most of them and browsing the rest. When I’m trying to bear down on a specific problem in my life, I become a voracious reader.
What I find, though, is that the more I read and the more I think about a problem, I often find myself changing directions a little bit because I begin to discover that the actual problem that needs solving isn’t exactly what I initially thought that it was.
A strategy I’ve been using in the last year or two that works incredibly well for piecing through life’s problems (and other intellectual problems, like figuring out where I stand on a political issue or working through a new idea) is called “three morning pages,” which I learned from the writings of Julia Cameron.
“Three morning pages” is a really simple idea. In the morning, just set aside an hour or so, open up a notebook, grab a pen, and start writing whatever comes into your mind. What happens is that the focus and time it takes to write down one thought often leads to the next thought that sensibly follows it, and so on, which usually ends up leading to greater understanding and a good conclusion. It’s kind of like the “five whys” that I do in my head, but more freeform.
At first, I was really skeptical of devoting this much time to a journaling practice in the morning, but I came to realize that this was an incredibly effective way of “sharpening the axe.” The process almost always left me feeling clearheaded and refreshed, and it almost always helped me integrate the things I was thinking about and the things I was learning into some really powerful conclusions.
What I’ve found is that this “three morning pages” practice often ends up being part of a feedback loop. I’ll end up thinking about some of the conclusions I’ve drawn and then that ends up fueling more reading, which ends up fueling more morning pages. Eventually, I end up reaching a really firm conclusion about what the problem actually is, but it usually takes some cycles of reflecting, reading, and journaling.
I view this as moving from just slapping on a Band-Aid to actually evaluating the disease and figuring out what’s wrong.
Most people care in a relatively shallow way about a lot of things, but they really only care about a few things (beyond their basic needs) enough to really take action on them. Think about how people profess how much they care about a political issue, for example, and then can scarcely “find the time” to even vote, let alone do campaign work or run for a local position.
Here’s a key truth for you: if a goal is not intrinsically tied to one of those things you truly care about on a deep level, it’s probably not going to succeed.
I was aware of my personal finance problem for most of a year, but it took the connection of that problem to something I cared enough about for me to take action – namely, my child’s future and my self-identity as a good father. If not for that, I likely would have kept pedaling in place, frustrated about my finances but not really changing anything about my behavior.
Why is it hard? Usually, we adopt behaviors we don’t like in some ways because we do like them in other ways, and when the habit is established, it’s very hard to break. We have to value something different more than the path we’re currently on plus the effort needed to change it. That’s not easy, especially when we already like aspects of the path we’re on.
That’s not easy. We all care about a lot of things, but very few things meet that threshold, and without that threshold, it’s hard to set a goal that requires major changes in life.
You have to recognize that achieving a goal means giving up something in your life right now. Achieving a goal means you’re devoting some resource in your life to that goal, whether it’s money, time, energy, or something else. That resource is currently being used for something else, probably something you value at least a little.
Part of the reason for carefully thinking about a goal and working through it is to uncover whether or not you really care about something enough to actually make change in your life or whether it’s wishful thinking. For most of us, that means it has to tap into something truly more important and urgent than the reasons why we already spend our time, money, and energy.
Simply adopting a goal isn’t enough. You have to know why you’re adopting that goal, and that’s why the homework and the journaling and the thinking is so important. You have to understand the why.
At some point, a switch will flip and it will begin to feel more “right” to actually start making a change in your life than to let things be as they are. That’s when you’re ready to actually develop your goal, and the first step is stating that goal.
This might seem obvious, too, but it’s actually harder than you might think. Most goals that people set for themselves aren’t all that useful – they’re really strong notions that pack a powerful personal punch, but they don’t really lead to any sort of action.
For example, you might want to “get your finances in order,” but what does that even mean?
Start by thinking about what you want to be different in your life as compared to how things are right now. That should be the core of your very basic goal. “I am currently X. I want to be Y.”
For example, you might say “I am currently in debt. I want to be free from debt.”
Or you might say “I am currently overweight. I want to have a normal weight.”
Or you might say “I am currently a bad father. I want to be a good father.”
A good goal starts by distinguishing where you’re at from where you want to be. That way, the change that you need to make becomes clear and then you can start revising that goal into something meaningful.
A good goal is one that sets you up for something clear that you can do each day to move toward the goal. One way to massage your goal in this fashion is to use the SMART rubric. SMART is an acronym for five elements that a good goal should have.
Spacific means that it is extremely clear what it is that you want to do. Simply stating your goal should make it abundantly clear what it is that you want to accomplish.
Your goal should answer five questions – what? why? where? who? which? Sometimes, some of these questions are assumed, but you should make them either as clear as possible or else rely on them as a very obvious assumption (“where” is often assumed, for example).
A goal of “I want to get my finances in order” can be made specific by “I want to eliminate my family’s debt load and set up an automatic plan to save enough to comfortably retire.”
Measurable means that the line between success and failure is immediately clear and usually represented by a number.
For example, with the finance goal above, the “measurable” is already there for part of it – a total debt of zero. The other part probably depends on some calculations – maybe you need to be automatically putting aside 15% of your salary for retirement to say you’ve succeeded. That’s clearly measurable.
Achievable means that it’s a goal you can actually pull off if you work hard at it. It doesn’t rely on things happening that are outside the possibility of your current life.
Debt repayment is an achievable goal for most people. On the other hand, becoming a billionaire isn’t an achievable goal for most people because it requires things that are outside what they have and what can easily be acquired. All the effort in the world won’t make you a billionaire unless you add a great idea, a bunch of skills, and a ton of luck.
Realistic means that it’s actually achievable within the constraints of your life. Everyone’s life is different – something might be achievable for a lot of people, but it’s not realistic for some of them.
A perfect example of this is a goal that is something you could pull off if you didn’t have kids or a husband or a job, but it’s essentially impossible to do with those things gobbling down resources (time, energy, money) in your life.
A good way to check whether a goal is realistic is to think about the people in your life that will be affected by your goal. Will they be able to “flex” enough to make room for the changes needed for you to achieve your goal? What will that require out of them?
Time-limited means that you’re setting a deadline for yourself to achieve that goal, which gives you some constant pressure to work on it. This time limit should be realistic, of course, and within what’s actually achievable (though pushing the edge of what you think you can handle can be a good motivator).
For example, someone who’s losing weight might shoot to lose 1.5 pounds a week for a year, which adds up to a 75 pound weight loss in a year.
When a SMART goal comes together, I find it useful to start constructing a plan almost immediately, and that plan comes from a series of questions. I ask what I can do in a series of timeframes to complete this goal or move forward on it.
What can I do in the next 12 months to achieve this goal?
What can I do before the end of the year to achieve this goal?
What can I do in the next three months to achieve this goal?
What can I do this month to achieve this goal?
What can I do this week to achieve this goal?
What can I do this weekend to achieve this goal?
What can I do today to achieve this goal?
I ask those questions over and over again, almost on a daily basis, which moves us into step five.
Almost all of the goals I set for myself are made up of some combination of two elements. They consist of to-dos, which are very specific actions that I need to take, and reminders, which are changes in behavior that I need to maintain in my life.
For example, if my goal was to read 20 books on a topic in a year and take notes on them, I would add an item to my to-do list, a repeating to-do that would tell me to read for an hour each day with my notebook and pen beside me. I constantly look at my to-do list throughout a given day and strive to empty it out most days. Having a to-do list that I don’t have to actively think about during the day is a great thing. (Unsurprisingly, my “three morning pages” often clarifies today’s to-do list, adding things and removing others.)
Other goals don’t work quite as well with specific to-dos. For those, I use reminders – more specifically, I use the “triggers” technique that I learned from Marshall Goldsmith’s book of the same name. Each morning, I run through a list of “triggers” – ongoing behavioral changes I’m wanting to work on in my life – and think about how I’m going to nail each one today. In the evening, I give each one a score from one to ten based on how well I pulled it off that day. Almost all behavioral goals I have wind up on this list of triggers.
Going through my trigger list makes up two of the items on my daily to-do list, to be done early in the morning and in the evening.
Again, these to-dos and triggers all spring forth from that series of questions I ask myself about that goal. When that goal is set in a SMART format, I start answering a cascade of questions about it that breaks it down into what I need to do today to move that goal forward, and those things are either to-dos (on my to-do list) or behaviors (on my trigger list).
Forming a good goal is great. Starting out on the journey to achieving it is great, too. To-dos and triggers are the nuts and bolts of it. But that’s not enough. Your goal will never go perfectly according to plan, ever, and success comes from constantly evaluating and readjusting your goal.
For me, this loops back to the journaling I mentioned early in this post. I do evaluation of my goals constantly in my thinking and in my three morning pages. Is this goal going well? Is it going poorly? What do I need to adjust, if anything?
I usually try to give a goal a month in its current implementation before I make changes. Quite often, the first few weeks don’t show any real results and I want to give it some time. Meditation as a daily practice, for example, didn’t show me any real results for the first three weeks, but now it’s a daily practice of mine; without giving it a month, I would have missed out.
Once a month or so, I go through my ongoing goals carefully. Is this going the way I want it to go? Why or why not? I also re-ask all of those goal breakdown questions and make sure all of the answers still make sense for me.
Again, this seems like extra work at first glance, but this kind of thing is the definition of sharpening the saw. Spending some time making sure that you’re doing sensible things and that you’ve got the tools you need to do them and that everything is in place almost always makes the whole task go far easier, and usually it ends up taking way less time and energy (even including the prep work) than just going about it in a haphazard and unconsidered way. Appreciating the power of sharpening the saw is one of the biggest steps forward I’ve made in my life in the past few years. If you spend time setting yourself up to knock things out of the park by thinking them through and getting ready for them, you’re going to end up with better results in less overall time and with less overall effort than you would have by just attacking them head on without any prep work.
I wish I could say that I had packaged all of this together so neatly during my own financial turnaround, but the truth is that my own turnaround was a lot more haphazard than this. I spent a long time sensing that there was a problem without really delving into it until I almost stumbled completely off a financial cliff, then I fell into a panic mode of homework and haphazardly throwing different tactics at the wall to see what stuck.
It worked solely because I was driven by something I cared deeply about – my sense of responsibility to my own future and that of my child. That pushed me to keep stumbling forward, but it was a stumble for a long while.
Knowing what I know now, the whole process would have been much smoother and much more efficient and less trying in places. If I had worked through the above process as soon as I began to sense something wrong, I would have been in a much better financial position much faster.
Another advantage of this process is that it has often kept me from diving into major goals that won’t end up panning out. I often care about something and want to work on it, but I realize that I don’t care enough to take on the changes in my life and those around me that it would require. Recognizing that early on has saved me from feeling like a failure about not achieving some ambitious goals that I cared about but not deeply enough.
If you have this nagging sense that something is “wrong” in your life – your finances, your relationships, your health, your career, whatever – start working through this process, right from the top. Start by “sharpening the saw” and thinking about what’s actually wrong, and when you’ve figured that out, try to transition it into a goal and see whether or not it fits into your life. It might turn into a life-changing goal, but even if it doesn’t, the process will bring you to a better place where you understand the realities of your life much better than before, and that’s well worth it.
Good luck!
The post Practical Goal Setting for Finance and Personal Success appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Hire Heroes USA is holding a free virtual career fair on Aug. 23 between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. EDT — aka between 1000 and 1500 hours.
According to the site’s FAQ page, participants only need a computer and internet access, as employers will communicate via onlinechats. Updated versions of Google Chrome or Firefox are recommended for viewing and hearing presentations from employers.
Attendees can register for the event on the site and upload their resumes, then search the 38 participating employers by location and positions available.
When they find a company of interest, job seekers can apply for a position or sign up for chat sessions to ask questions and learn more about the company.
Employers and attendees can also request private chats to discuss specific opportunities. Employers may offer video one-on-one chats, but these sessions are not required if job seekers don’t have access to video conferencing.
The site encourages job seekers to prepare questions to ask in the chat room and develop an elevator pitch for private interactions with potential employers. We have additional tips from veterans about finding a civilian career.
If this virtual fair isn’t for you, check out our list of other employment resources for veterans.
Tiffany Wendeln Connors is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
For example, I’m sure there’s a fair amount of people — myself included — who think that jet-setting around the world on someone else’s dime is a pipe dream. But two companies have come together to make that dream a reality.
The gin brand Bombay Sapphire and Mr. Fogg’s, a group of Victorian-themed bars inspired by Verne’s novel “Around the World in 80 Days,” have joined forces to organize a competition fit for the bravest of gin-loving adventurers.
One lucky winner will be chosen to serve as an ambassador for the two brands. The mission?
Go on an all-expenses paid, 80-day journey around the world, following in fictional explorer Phileas Fogg’s footsteps and hitting locations such as Hong Kong, Paris, New York, Bombay and more. And all the while, you’ll be sipping on as many gin and tonics as your heart desires.
And if that doesn’t sound awesome enough on its own, here’s even more good news: You get to bring a companion on your travels. Huzzah!
Alas, this is technically a job, which means they aren’t just paying you to have a good time.
Along the way, you and your traveling buddy will be responsible for documenting the trip through social media and blog posts.
On top of recording your exploits, you’ll also collect various ingredients such as herbs, botanicals and spices. At the end of your 80 days, you’ll return to the soon-to-be opened addition to Mr. Fogg’s bar collection: Society of Exploration. There you’ll use the gathered ingredients to create your very own “Around the World” cocktail.
All flights, alternative travel methods and accommodation will be paid for, a spokesperson confirmed to me through email. And on top of that, you’ll be given spending money throughout the trip. Bombay Sapphire ambassadors will also organize various “once in a lifetime experiences.”
The overall value of the trip isn’t specified on the job listing, but the spokesperson informed me that the rough estimate is $20,000.
So, what does one have to do to snag this all-expenses-paid adventure?
For starters, the candidate should be “courageous, lionhearted and valiant.” And if that doesn’t quite clear it up for you, here’s a few more qualifications:
Applicants should also be familiar with “Around the World in 80 Days,” have a passion for adventure and be available to travel between August and November of 2018.
Sounds pretty great, right? Go ahead, mix yourself a Tom Collins for some gin-spiration and fill out this application. But make sure you submit it by the deadline, August 27.
Kaitlyn Blount is a staff writer at The Penny Hoarder. She is suddenly feeling quite thirsty. Hey, it’s 5 o’clock somewhere, right?
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
Social media marketing has become a necessity for brand survival in today’s day and age.
But simply creating profiles on these platforms and hoping the rest will take care of itself is not an effective strategy. You need to be active on social media.
While you may have already recognized the importance of social sites such as Facebook, it’s time for you to focus on other platforms—specifcally, Instagram.
Instagram, with its features and benefits, was part of the top social media trends of 2018 I wrote about.
Instagram has more than 1 billion users. Of those users, 500 million use the platform on a daily basis.
Only Facebook and YouTube have more active users.
For the most part, Instagram users are younger. Nearly 60% of Instagram users in the United States are under the age of 30.
This is important to recognize if you’re segmenting your target audience with generational marketing.
How can you use Instagram to promote your brand effectively?
Your content might be great, but if nobody sees what you’re posting, you won’t have results. That’s why you need to focus on engagement metrics:
You need to measure all these to determine the success of your Instagram marketing campaigns.
If you need some help with this, I can steer you in the right direction. I’ve identified and explained the top 13 ways to improve your engagement rates on Instagram.
Review the tips I’ve explained in this guide, and apply the tactics to your brand’s page.
Do you remember the days when we used to refer to the tic-tac-toe board as a pound sign?
Well, social media changed that symbol forever. Now the symbol (#) at the bottom right-hand side of your telephone keypad is more commonly referred to as a hashtag.
As a social media marketer, you need to incorporate hashtags into your Instagram strategy.
Research shows that the majority of posts by the top brands on social media only use a few hashtags:
If the top brands are using them, your brand needs to as well.
Furthermore, 70% of Instagram hashtags are branded. Posts with only one hashtag receive 12.6% greater engagement than posts without hashtags.
When deciding what hashtags to use, you want to be broad to appeal to the widest possible audience.
However, hashtags that are too broad will not stand out. On the other hand, if your hashtag is extremely unique, nobody will search for it.
You need to find some middle ground for your hashtag.
Even though the top brands aren’t using many hashtags, research shows that engagement rates reach their peak when a post has nine hashtags.
It’s also worth noting that hashtags with 21 characters have the highest engagement rates. And 24-character hashtags were second on this list.
You don’t need to be shy with the number of hashtags or characters you’re using. Just don’t go overboard, or you’ll appear too spammy.
To have higher and more valuable engagement rates, you need to increase your social following.
If your social media marketing strategy is effective, you can convert your Instagram followers into customers. This needs to be your ultimate goal.
To get more followers, you need to promote your Instagram profile on all your distribution channels:
As a result, you’ll get more traffic to your Instagram page. Because of this increased traffic more people will follow your page.
Even if people don’t follow you right away, at least they are exposed to your brand. Now your content may appear on their page, and they might engage with your posts in the future.
Contests are another great way to gain exposure for your brand.
In addition to the increased brand awareness, contests run on Instagram have been proven to dramatically boost engagement rates.
It’s because contests encourage user-generated content.
Plus, the fact that you’re giving something away to the winner entices people to participate. Overall, it’s a winning strategy.
The best contests incorporate hashtags, which is something I discussed earlier.
Set up a unique hashtag for each contest you run.
It will allow you to track all participants’ submissions.
Further, this will make it easier for you to judge the winner.
And this unique hashtag will also be a way through which other people can see your brand and its popularity.
Instagram users who may have never heard of your brand might see posts from contest participants.
As a result, these users may be enticed to follow your page. Once they start following you, they will be more likely to engage with your content.
Emojis.
These little animations are no longer just for your personal messages. Brands are starting to use them as well to drive engagements.
In fact, 56% of Instagram profiles use emojis.
In the last year, emoji usage on Instagram went up by 19%. Adding emojis to your post increases engagement by 2.07%.
This makes sense. Emojis in captions add a personal touch to your posts.
Users will feel as if they’re looking at posts from a friend as opposed to some giant corporation. The added comfort your followers will feel when seeing posts with emojis will encourage them to engage with your posts.
Besides that, you need to learn how to write Instagram captions that drive engagement.
Ask your followers to comment on your posts with their favorite emoji or an emoji that best describes the reaction to your content.
I expect the trends related to emoji usage to continue rising in the foreseeable future.
While Instagram may have started as a platform for sharing photos, the social network has adapted to the new trends and made appropriate changes.
Initially, Instagram had a 15-second limit on videos when the feature was first made available in 2013. But that number jumped to 60 seconds a few years later.
As a result, the amount of time users spent watching videos increased by 40% in the first six months of the change.
It’s no secret that consumers want to see more video content.
But how will videos affect your engagement rates? Let’s take a look:
As you can see, videos on Instagram typically get more than double the number of comments compared to photos.
While photos get more likes than videos, your Instagram videos will still get plenty of views, even if users aren’t liking them.
Mix up your content, and start posting more videos. I’m not saying you need to shy away from photos completely, but try to find a balance between the two.
As I just finished saying, you need to change up your content strategy on Instagram.
Posting similar photos from different angles and just changing the caption slightly will bore your followers. Nobody wants to follow accounts like that, and people certainly won’t engage with your posts.
Post funny content. If you make people laugh, they’ll be more likely to tag their friends in the comments.
This will help increase your engagement metrics.
If it fits with your brand image, you can even post content that’s edgy, controversial, or even somewhat sexual in nature—anything that’s going to raise some eyebrows and grab the attention of users.
Share crazy news. Be provocative.
Post surprising or shocking photos and videos.
Just don’t do anything that might damage your brand reputation.
But try to make sure you’re not posting the same thing over and over again. That’s boring and won’t drive engagement.
To get high engagement on your posts, you need to make sure your audience sees your content.
That’s why you need to determine the best times to post.
I’m referring to the time of day in addition to the best days of the week.
There are lots of different answers to this question, depending on whom you ask. That said, I like these results from CoSchedule:
Their research shows that Mondays and Thursdays are the best days of the week to post although, for the most part, your metrics on weekdays will be pretty similar.
Engagement on Sundays is the lowest.
That’s probably because people are out and about doing things on the weekend. If they’re busy, they won’t be active on social media as much.
The times you post will also be determined by your target audience.
For example, let’s say your brand is targeting consumers who live in the United States. It’s worth noting that 80% of the US population is located in the Eastern and Central Time Zones.
These are the types of things you need to take into consideration before you post something.
In addition to sharing your Instagram content on your distribution channels, you can leverage your relationships with social influencers to expose your profile to a wider audience.
These people can promote your brand, products, and profile to their followers. Since social influencers have great engagement rates with their audiences, those results will translate to your page.
That’s because users trust social influencers.
If they endorse your brand, it will increase the chances of more people viewing your page. Now that they’ve landed on your page, they’ll engage with your content.
You can combine this strategy with one of the other tips I’ve discussed, such as contests.
Let a social influencer give away one of your products as a promotional campaign for your Instagram page.
Influencers are also great options for account takeovers, but we’ll discuss this strategy in greater detail shortly.
You know you need to post content on a regular basis. But what type of photos should you be posting?
I highly recommend posting images with faces.
That’s because photos with faces receive 38% more likes than photos without faces.
Look at how Nike used this concept on its Instagram profile:
As you can see, eight of these nine consecutive posts contain faces.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the only type of content you should be posting. But when in doubt, share a picture that shows someone’s face.
We already established you need to share video content on Instagram to drive engagement.
But I’ve got a way for you to make your video strategy even better. Add subtitles.
Video subtitles increase view times by 12%.
It’s worth noting that on Facebook, 85% of videos are watched without sound.
Since Facebook owns Instagram, we can safely assume those numbers translate to Instagram as well.
You posted a picture of someone’s face and added a hashtag to your caption. It’s time to post, right?
Not so fast.
Before you post your photos, you should tag their locations. Research shows that posts with tagged locations have 79% higher engagement rates.
You can add a location tag even if you aren’t actually there. If your office is in San Francisco but you’re trying to promote something in Miami, you can still add Miami to the tag.
Just don’t get caught with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background of your photo, or users will know you’re not in Miami.
Check out this example from Lululemon.
This image was shared on July 28, 2018.
The date corresponds with the Hermosa Beach Open, which is an AVP beach volleyball tournament.
Was this photo actually taken on this day at this location? Maybe. But maybe not.
Either way, it’s promoting beach volleyball gear during a beach volleyball tournament at that location. So the location fits the post.
You need to learn how to use Instagram story to promote your business.
When you add a new post to your profile, announce it on your story. This will double your engagement metrics.
First, you’ll get a view and impression on your story.
Then, users will be enticed to view the new post. After that, you can encourage them to like and comment on the post by implementing the other strategies I’ve discussed so far.
This relates to the discussion about social influencers.
An influencer may allow you to take over their account for a period of time. You can post content to their story or even broadcast a live video.
On the flip side, you can let an influencer take over your account. Here’s an example from Shopify:
Amber Mac not only took over the Shopify account but also promoted it on her profile as well.
Now her followers have a reason to visit the Shopify profile to see what she’s up to over there. This will boost the engagement metrics during that time period.
Furthermore, if those users like the content you post as a guest of another account, they may end up following your page, which increases your chances of having additional engagements with those users moving forward.
Your Instagram profile is a valuable marketing tool. But you’ll be successful only if you know how to use this tool correctly.
Ultimately, your content needs to drive engagements.
Getting users to like, comment, view, share, and click on your posts will increase your brand exposure and help you generate more leads.
As a result, your business will be more profitable.
If you’re unhappy with your current engagement rates or if you think there’s room for improvement, refer to this guide.
Implement the tactics listed above to boost your Instagram engagement rates.
How is your brand using Instagram to focus on user engagement?
Tim writes in:
Question for the Mailbag: how exactly does a target retirement fund actually work? Every time I read about it it makes less sense.
This did start off as a question in the mailbag, but the answer became so long that it seemed sensible to give Tim’s question its own article.
Let’s start off talking about risk and reward.
There are a ton of different investment options out there. They differentiate themselves in a bunch of different ways. Some are really low risk, but don’t offer much return, like a savings account. Even in the best online savings account, you’re going to earn only 1% to 2% a year, but there is essentially zero chance of losing money.
Over the course of 10 years, an investment like this might see returns each year of 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, 1.5%, and 1.5%, giving an average of (you guessed it) 1.5%. While the average is pretty low, notice that there is no individual year where money is lost. There is no time in which it is “bad” to have to rely on your investment, because this investment is as reliable as can be.
As you start adding risk, you generally start adding more return, like, say, VBTLX (the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund), which offers a better average annual return (around 4%), but has a chance of losing money in a particular given year.
Over the course of 10 years, an investment like this might see returns each year of 4.5%, 3.3%, 4.8%, 4.9%, 4.5%, 4.3%, -0.5%, 4.7%, 4.8%, and 4.7%, giving an average of 4%. The annual returns are fairly consistent, but note that -0.5% year. In that year, the investment lost money, and there will definitely be years like that over the long haul.
Those lower-than-average years – and particularly those losing years – are problematic. Let’s say you’ve had a run of above average years and you’ve decided you have just enough money in your investment to make retirement work. Then, as soon as you retire, that investment spends the next year losing money, throwing off your math entirely and making retirement look real dicey. While it’s not too bad in the case of this investment, the riskier you get, the more likely this scenario is to happen. Those year-to-year variations are often referred to as volatility – an investment is volatile if it has a lot of those variations.
Let’s add some more risk and look at the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTSMX). It has an average annual return since inception of 9.72%, which seems sweet, right? Let’s look closer.
Let’s look at the last 10 years of annual returns for it in reverse order: 21.05%, 12.53%, 0.29%, 12.43%, 33.35%, 16.25%, 0.96%, 17.09%, 28.70%, and -37.04%. Three of those ten years are worse than a savings account. One of them involves losing more than 37% of your investment.
This investment is even more volatile. Consider that you’re just starting your retirement and you have your money all in this investment and you hit one of those 40% loss years. That’s going to change the math of your retirement drastically. You’ll be pulling money out to live on as the market drops, which means that you will have depleted a much higher percentage of your retirement savings than you should in a single year and you’ll probably have to do that for the next two or three years while you wait for the market to rebound. This leaves you with a permanently depleted retirement savings, which either means very lean living late in life or a return to the workforce.
Want to see what that looks like in numbers? Let’s say you have $1 million invested in this and you retire, deciding to withdraw $50,000 a year to live on. That’s 5% a year, which is pretty risky, but you believe in that long term average return. Well, during the first year, the investment loses 40% of its value. It drops to $600,000… but you took out $50,000 to live on, so it’s actually just $550,000. Going forward, if you take $50,000 a year out of that, you’re going to go bankrupt in about 15 years (if not sooner, depending on volatility).
You can keep adding more and more risk and get a higher average annual return, but the key word here is average. You can look at things like the VSIAX (the Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund), which has a very high average annual return but is primed to take an absolute beating the next time the stock market declines, meaning it’ll lose a large percentage of its value as those businesses struggle during an economic downturn (causing some investors to sell) and other investors flee to safer investments. You eventually reach investments that are tantamount to gambling, like cryptocurrency, which is so volatile that you might triple your investment or lose half of it in a month or two.
So, what’s the message here? If you have a lot of years before you retire, you want your money in something pretty aggressive that has really good average annual returns, but might have a few individual years that are really rough. If you don’t need the money anytime soon, those individual bad years don’t really matter to you – in fact, they’re kind of a blessing for you because it’s cheaper to buy into an investment when the market is down.
As you start getting close to retirement and actually retiring, those individual years start to become much more important. Unless you have a very large amount in your retirement account, you can’t afford one of those big down years that are somewhat likely to eventually happen with an aggressive investment. If it happens, you’re going to be right back in the workforce.
The solution, then, is to be aggressive with your retirement investments when you’re young and then, when you approach retirement, move your investments to less aggressive and less volatile investments that you can rely on more.
The best way to start understanding what a target-date index fund does is to look at some people who are on the road to retirement.
Angie is 25 years old. She’s not intending to retire for 40 years. Because her retirement is so far off, she can afford quite a lot of risk in her retirement savings. She can afford to invest in things that have a pretty good average annual return that’s paired with the risk of enormous loss. She might put her money into the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index and/or the Vanguard Small-Cap Value Index Fund. Her goal is to build as much value as she can over the next 40 years and chasing a high average annual return is the best way to do that.
Brad is 45 years old. He’s not intending to retire for 20 years. He’s probably still going to be pretty aggressive, but the idea of going less volatile might start popping up in his head. He still wants a very high average annual return, but there will come a point soon where he needs to make some changes.
Connor is 60 years old. He’s thinking of retiring in five years. He’s got almost enough to retire in his retirement savings. At this point, he really can’t afford to have everything in an aggressive investment that might drop 40% of its value. So, he might leave some of it in stocks, but the rest might be moved to bonds. His average annual return might be lower, but he’s no longer running the risk of losing 40% of his entire retirement savings.
Dana is 70 years old. If her retirement savings keeps growing in a slow and stable fashion, returning just a few percent per year but not losing a bunch of value in any given year, she’ll be fine. She probably wants to be mostly in the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index and maybe even have some in a money market fund (akin to a savings account with very little risk).
As you can see from these stories, as you get older and closer to retirement, it makes a lot of sense to gradually shift your investments from highly aggressive investments to more conservative ones. The issue, though, is how does one know when to start making those transitions? Furthermore, will you remember to do it, and to do it right? Those aren’t easy questions for individuals saving for retirement. It’s not entirely clear when to do this or how to do this, and many individuals aren’t going to put in the research and time to do it. People just want to put away the money and then have money when it’s time to retire.
That’s where target retirement funds come in. They do this automatically.
Let’s look back at 25 year old Angie. She aims to retire in about 40 years. So, theoretically, she wants to choose a pretty aggressive investment to put her retirement savings into. However, when she’s in her late forties or early fifties, she might want to begin slowly making things more conservative, and this gets even more true as she reaches retirement age and then retires. She doesn’t want a nasty shock when she’s old.
That’s what a target retirement fund does automatically. If Angie is 25, she’s going to retire sometime around 2060, so she might buy into a Target Retirement 2060 fund with her retirement savings. Right now, that target retirement fund will be really aggressive, but as the decades pass and the 2040s arrive, it’s going to slowly become less aggressive, and in the 2050s, it becomes even less so. It cuts out the volatility in exchange for a lower average annual return as it gets closer to its target date.
How does it do that? A target retirement fund is just made up of a bunch of different funds, and as time passes, the people managing the target retirement fund slowly move money out of some of the funds inside of it and move it into other funds.
So, for example, a Target Retirement 2060 fund might today be made up of 50% VSIAX and 50% VTSMX – in other words, it’s really aggressive, entirely invested in stocks, and some of those stocks are small companies that will either grow like gangbusters (big returns) or flame out (big losses). That’s okay for now – volatility is completely fine when you’re that far from retirement. What you want is a big average annual return over the next 25 years or so.
However, at some point down the road, probably in the mid-2040s, that fund will start becoming less aggressive. The money within the fund will be moved by the fund managers into things like bond funds or real estate, things that don’t have quite so high of an average annual return but aren’t going to see years of big losses, either.
By the time 2060 rolls around, all of the money in that fund will be in pretty safe stuff, which means you can rely on that fund to be stable in retirement.
That’s what a retirement fund does: It’s made up of a bunch of different investments that are gradually moved from highly aggressive things to less aggressive things as the target date approaches. When the “target” year is many, many years in the future, the fund will be really aggressive and really volatile, aiming for big returns over the next two decades at the cost of some really rough individual years. As the “target” year gets closer and closer, the fund gets less and less aggressive and less and less volatile, becoming something you can rely on.
That’s why, for people who aren’t really involved in managing the nuances of their own retirement savings, a target retirement fund with a target year pretty close to their retirement year is a really solid choice. It just manages that gradual shift for you without you having to lift a finger.
Good luck!
More by Trent Hamm:
The post How Does a Target Retirement Fund Actually Work? appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
You know that saying, “Things get worse before they get better”? Buckle in. Your already long journey isn’t over yet.
Emotionally, this is basically the worst. You have these debts looming over you, no confidence in your longtime spouse and fear about the best way to get out. Your first steps to extricate yourself need to be strategic. Businesslike. Not emotionless, but with your emotions put off to the side for a little while.
First, get a free credit report to take stock of what’s at stake here. What debts are in both your names instead of just yours or just his? Those will be the ones you need to worry about most. Divorce typically doesn’t free couples from shared debt obligations, which is part of the reason so many people get stuck communicating with their terrible exes for longer than they’d like.
The same goes for your home — if you want out from under it, you’re probably going to need to either sell it together (and take the loss for the work it needs) or strike a deal between you about who keeps the house.
Pulling a credit report and getting your finances (as much as you have access to) organized will help in the next step, which is getting some professional assistance. Based on what you noted about verbal abuse, I’m concerned about your safety. Consider contacting a victim advocate who can help you develop a plan to exit this relationship safely. Even if you think you’ve got this handled, it helps to have backup to support you, not just emotionally but with the logistics.
It may also be a good use of inheritance money to secure an attorney you trust. Because you have property and other shared assets with your husband, you’ll want some help with the nitty-gritty of the divorce proceedings.
Remember, you don’t have to mutually want a divorce to get out of this relationship. You can be the plaintiff who files against him.
Consider your safety first. You might lose money at the end of all this, either because you had to pay off debts to get rid of them or because you had to spend on legal counsel. But it’s money well-spent if it can provide peace of mind, safety and eventual financial freedom.
The inbox is open. Submit a question or send your worries to dearpenny@thepennyhoarder.com, and I’ll see what I can do to help.
Disclaimer: Chosen questions and featured answers will appear in The Penny Hoarder's “Dear Penny” column. I won't be able to answer every single letter (I can only type so fast!). We reserve the right to edit and publish your questions. Don’t worry — your identity will remain anonymous. I don’t have a psychology, accounting, finance or legal degree, so my advice is for general informational purposes only. I do, however, promise to give you honest advice based on my own insights and real-life experiences.
Lisa Rowan is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
One of the most popular ways to earn money from home is through owning and operating your own blog. As a blogger, I can tell you one thing — you get out what you put in. Success doesn’t happen with writing a couple of good articles. It can be frustrating, depressing, and oddly enjoyable. There […]
The post 10 Fabulous Freebies for Bloggers appeared first on The Work at Home Woman.
In our increasingly cashless society, teaching children about money is more vital than ever. Our experts explain the best ways to do it.
Undertaking good money habits starts at a young age and an increasing number of schools are now providing personal finance lessons to help children get to grips with money matters.
But not all schools have to teach personal finance (only those that follow the national curriculum should do so), so learning about money needs to happen outside of the classroom, too.
Research conducted by NatWest in November 2016 shows that just 43% of young people feel confident managing their money. Worryingly, almost a third of those aged 16 and 17 have no experience of putting money into a bank account, while 59% can’t read a payslip.
We’ve rounded up some top tips from education experts to help parents and grandparents teach their children about money.
Young Money, which is part of the charity Young Enterprise, aims to give young people the skills, knowledge and confidence to earn and manage money by providing advice and resources to schools, colleges and universities.
Russell Winnard, head of educator services at Young Money, says teaching children where money comes from is crucial. “We are an increasingly cashless society and it can be difficult for young people to understand what happens during a contactless payment transaction,” he explains.
When in shops, paying in cash can help children see that you have to swap money for goods, rather than just tapping a magic plastic card on a machine and taking what you want.
Mr Winnard says: “It’s good to involve children in the weekly shop – get them to help you choose the best-value products and add up the cost of the shopping basket on the way round.”
Survey results published in February 2018 by financial provider Prudential found that over three-quarters (78%) of teachers and more than a third (37%) of parents believe the growing cashless society is harmful to a child’s financial development.
Mr Winnard adds that showing your child your payslip and explaining how you found employment and earned that money can help them understand where money comes from.
Education group Stride works with schools in the South East and Greater London to incorporate enterprise courses into the curriculum. It aims to introduce children to the business world and runs sessions that mimic real-life scenarios where children are loaned money as a team and challenged to design, set up and run a profitable business.
Elena Macia, co-founder of Stride, says giving children real-life financial responsibility as early as possible is key.
She says: “If your child wants a ‘big ticket’ item, encourage them to plan how they will achieve it – maybe they can ask for birthday money rather than gifts, earn cash by doing chores or save their pocket money – get them to do some sums to work out how much they need and how long it will take to save it.”
Getting children to make choices related to money can also help them start to think about the value of cash, she adds. Parents and grandparents can set a budget for an afternoon out and help the kids work out the best way to allocate the money – they may discover that forgoing pricey drinks and snacks at the cinema means the family can go for a meal afterwards instead, for example.
Financial education charity MyBnk provides workshops to people aged 11 to 25 to help them learn about saving, budgeting and starting up a business. The charity works with schools and youth organisations, and says it has helped more than 200,000 young people to date.
Declan Wilkes, head of communications at MyBnk, says making things fun is important to capture kids’ imaginations. “Starting a conversation about the cost of Beyoncé’s gold leggings might not seem serious but it can help start a discussion about the cost of living in relation to income,” he explains.
Other exercises he suggests include asking children to explain the difference between something you want and something you need. Ask them to list the last five things they bought and decide which category they fall into.
For older children, he suggests linking chores to rewards in order to help encourage putting a value on money. Another useful exercise is involving kids in the household finances to help them understand what it costs to run a house.
He adds: “You can identify a savings goal and plot out a way to achieve it – perhaps by explaining how to cut back on spending or incentivising savings by matching what your children put aside.”
RedSTART is an initiative that aims to help young people learn to budget, save, invest and give back to society. Its goal is to educate one million children and give them the skills to manage their financial future.
Natalie Beardwell, head of marketing at RedSTART, says creating the balance between fun and learning is important if you want to get kids interested in money. RedSTART, for example, runs a workshop that asks children to grow £500 of virtual money as much as they can in a day by applying simple investment and money management concepts.
Another important skill to teach young people is delayed gratification. Ms Beardwell suggests giving kids first-hand experience of managing a budget with a pretend currency – agree what a treat will cost and then explain that they can spend their currency for a small treat every day or save up for a bigger treat at the weekend.
She says: “A habit such as delayed gratification is simple to learn and will be hugely beneficial once children start dealing with money in the real world – and learning that money is all about helping your future self.”
MoneySense is an education programme for those aged five to 18, backed by high street bank NatWest. The scheme aims to help children build the knowledge and confidence to manage their own money.
Kirsty Britz, director of sustainable banking at NatWest, says: “Educating young people about money has never been more important due to the variety of ways now available to spend.”
A crucial lesson to learn is how to keep your money safe. Ms Britz says it is vital to impress upon children the importance of looking after their hard-earned cash – explain that they should store it somewhere safe and ask them to double-check that they have put their money away again after they have bought something in a shop.
Opening a bank account may also encourage kids to keep their cash in the bank where it won’t be stolen. It may also reduce the temptation to spend it! She adds that seeing a bank statement with regular deposits and interest payments growing to a large sum is a great incentive to keep saving.
HOLLY BLACK is a freelance personal finance and investment journalist.
