When we have small children, money is tight and our needs and wants can seem absolutely endless. Just go shopping with a four-year-old and you’ll see what I mean. I too have a guilty desire to get my child through the shopping trip by using bribes – I mean rewards – or is that treats?
However much I value my sanity, I also value saving money. This is something that is deeply important to me because my childhood home was not always financially secure, or at least I didn’t perceive it to be that way. While I spend money on my child every day, I also save money for her every day. We do this through the usual channels, like an educational savings plan. I have to say that sometimes my daughter appears to be richer than I am.
In addition to education, I also value travel, entrepreneurship, and lifestyle. As a student in my first year of university, I decided to take a trip to China to learn Mandarin. It was a splurge afforded to me by some money that I came into at the time. I did need to make some difficult decisions about money to afford that trip, but it shaped my educational career, leading to an abiding love of Chinese history and an eventual Masters’ degree that focused in part on Asian environmental issues. That trip was both the goal of a teenager and something that shaped my future. It was important, and in retrospect I do not consider it to be a frill at all.
Our educational savings plans cover standard education, but they don’t cover life education. To help my daughter afford that, every month I save a little bit of money in what I call her dream fund. I don’t plan to tell her about this fund until she finishes high school. When she is in her late teens or early twenties, I will give her that money. It won’t be much, and she will still need to save for her life learning goals, but I hope that it will start her on a path of learning and exploration that she would not otherwise be able to afford.