Five Tips to help you Budget for Fundraisers
By: Neale S. Godfrey, New York Times #1 Best Selling author
Parents are bombarded with an endless assortment of school year fundraisers. There are so many opportunities for your children to support worthwhile causes, but at $5 for a bake sale item to support the cheerleaders, $15 to buy wrapping paper that the student body is selling – carnivals, Girl Scout Cookies, and so on – by the end of the school year, the drip drip drip of cash adds up to a significant total.
You can take control of the spending.
1. Hold a family meeting. Emphasize your support for charity and your understanding of how many causes pop up at school. You know that they would like to support everything, but you just can't do it all. You have to decide on the amount you will spend for the year, and the family should decide which causes you will support.
2. I am a strong advocate that, from an early age,
kids should be on an Allowance and Budget – they earn a weekly amount tied to
chores, on the work for pay principle.
They budget their money, which is a healthy way to handle it. There are four components to my budget
system: Charity, Quick Cash, Medium-term
Savings and Long-term Savings. Ten
percent of all money the children earn should go to charity – the balance is
divided among the remaining categories.
3. Your kids can choose to use a portion of their
Charity savings. They can also do extra
jobs to add to their cash, just make sure you pay by the job and not by the
hour – you don't want a twenty minute job to turn into a five hour one. You
might want to have a matching program where you will match their donation
dollar for dollar.
4. They are going to have to say “no” to some
fundraisers, and they're going to have to learn that saying “no” is perfectly
acceptable. Empower your kids to say
“This is what my family decided,” and “I'd like to make a donation, but it's
not in my budget.” They shouldn't feel
guilty – they shouldn't be bullied. Make
it clear that we don't donate in order to keep up with the other kids – the
same way we don't buy things in order to keep up with the neighbors.
5. We need to teach our children all the ways money
can work positively, but contributing to fundraisers does not have to be
limited to giving money. Volunteerism –
giving of one's time or talent – is a great way to participate. Instead of
buying that $5 baked treat, or ordering $15 worth of wrapping paper, your kids
can help with the selling, or advertising.
Supporting fundraisers is a great way teach your children the concepts of charity and volunteerism. It is also an important way of reinforcing money lessons in the real world that will last a lifetime. Following the tips will help you stop that slow leaking of unaccounted for funds.
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About the author:
Neale Godfrey created the topic of kids and money while she was President of The First Women’s Bank and opened The First Children’s Bank at FAO Schwarz in 1988 and an Institute for Youth Entrepreneurship in 1988. She is a New York Times #1 Best Selling author of27 books and financial literacy curricula, pre-school through high school and her programs have reached over 2,000,000 parents/grandparents/children/educators. She has also created two #1 Educational Gaming apps that teach financial literacy and connect with parents and grandparents via email as the young children, 5-10 play. The app can be downloaded HERE
