Raising Cash Smart Kids

I have recently been chatting to an amazing woman, Shonika Proctor. She volunteers her time to work with disadvantaged kids – helping them to start businesses! Her story, and the stories of her kids, are just incredible, and I hope to be able to share some with you over the next few weeks.

In the meanwhile, however, Shonika has been kind enough to pass on some of her mentoring tips. These are the principles she has used to take some of her kids from disaster area to role model in an incredibly short timeframe. With kids from luckier backgrounds, her methods are bound to bear fruit.

Apply these tips with the dedication and commitment that Shonika has, and your kids could be the next big young entrepreneur success stories!

10 Tips For Parents of (Pre) Teen Entrepreneurs by Shonika Proctor

For teenage entrepreneurs, it’s not just homework or hormones and friends or fashion. For these exceptional young people, it’s all of that – plus finding funding, building business and securing their futures at an early age.

And it’s important that their parents understand and appreciate their struggles and offer them support every step of the way. These 10 tips are a great way to help young entrepreneurs start down a path toward success.

1. Start early.

By exploring interests at an early age, it encourages children to take an active pursuit of their passion – and perhaps eventually turn it into profit. Visit museums or parks, check books out of the library – anything to help cultivate their genius.

2. Try different stuff.

“If at first you don’t succeed …” It’s a good quote for a reason. Help potential profiteers learn this for themselves by encouraging learning by trial and error. Keep trying plans or products until they find the one that excites them into entrepreneurship.

3. Discuss values.

Equip them with the tools they need to make important decisions by discussing ethics and the importance of playing fair and being honest – on the field, in life and in business.

4. Make a business plan.

A business plan needn’t be long – a one-page plan should work for most efforts. By answering the below questions, teens will be able to clearly define their products, customers and advantages:

-What business am I in?

-Who are my customers?

-How will my customers know about me?

-How am I different?

5. Ask questions.

Enforce the need to think everything through early by asking questions – even if they may be hard for young people to answer. And remember: Be careful to come across as a partner, not as a nag! During this step, you should discuss materials, inventory, funding and budgeting.

6. Use the Internet.

From research to retail to advertising, the Internet is an important tool for fledgling businesses. Many teens have a marked advantage here, as they’re better online than any generation before them. Remember, always monitor site usage and message board posts!

7. Serve others.

It’s important that children have a plan that includes giving back to the world. Does the business offer a product or service that those less fortunate would benefit from? If so, work or product could be given away for free or at cost. If not, discuss setting aside a portion of the profits for a reputable organization that helps those in need.

8. Film a commercial.

This step is fun, and the confidence that children get from being on screen is amazing. Brainstorm ideas – from serious to silly – write a script and enlist the help of friends and family to round out the cast.

9. Develop a marketing plan.

Even the youngest entrepreneur should be actively involved in sales from day one. Ask them to develop a plan – and encourage them to think big (”no” should not be a part of this step!). Guide them to consider promotional or partnership opportunities; community stores or leaders who would allow advertising/product placement; advertising activities and more.

10. Define a style.

All children are leaders: They just have different styles and a unique selling point. Help fine-tune that style by building a leadership platform based on individual strengths and weaknesses.

These 10 tips are a great way to kick off what will hopefully be a long and successful business endeavor. But remember: Just as every child is unique, so is every business and every plan. There are no rules – other than to have fun, work hard and continue to learn and grow along the way. Good luck!

Shonika Proctor, the Nika’Nator, is a youth & teen entrepreneur coach who helps aspiring and emerging young entrepreneurs demolish their drama and build dreams. If you enjoyed these tips, you can get more like them at the Renegade CEOs web site.

Today’s post is a guest post from Amanda van der Gulik, from TeachingChildrenAboutMoney.com. Amanda emailed my daughter Rachael recently, asking if Rachael would do an interview for Amanda’s blog, and I liked Amanda’s site so much I asked her if she would share some of her material with my readers, too.

Stay tuned for news of when Rachael’s interview will appear on Amanda’s blog. In the meanwhile, enjoy Amanda’s great motivational tips for kids and adults alike.

Hello Fellow Parents of Kid Entrepreneurs,

I was honoured to be asked to write a post for Jenny.

I really like what she teaches. And her kids are amazing!

A little about me: who is Amanda van der Gulik?

I am a homeschooling mompreneur who is dedicated to helping parents raise their kids financial IQ’s.

Jenny and I seem to have a lot in common and plan to work together to help give our kids the best start to their financial lives that we can.

Did you know that the main reason young couples today divorce is because of financial stress?

Did you also know that the majority of bankruptcies today is with young adults under the age of 30!

We can give our kids a better chance in life with both their finances as well as their relationships with their future spouses by simply giving them a good financial foundation to grow from.

I will be writing a series of posts for Jenny and she will be doing the same for me on my own blog. Today I will begin by talking to you about the Law of Attraction. We achieve what we conceive and believe.

In other words you first need to dream, then you need to believe that you will achieve your dream from the depths of your soul and then you will achieve your dreams.

I highly recommend you get your child started on creating their own ‘vision board’. This is a board that they can hang on their wall in their bedroom somewhere where they will see it on a regular basis.

I suggest hanging it in front of their desk or even attach it to their ceiling above their beds. If they have their own bathrooms then I suggest hanging their vision board opposite their toilet so that while they visit this important room on a continuous basis they can digest their vision.

So what is a ‘vision board’?

Okay, a vision board is a board that you create a collage on with picutres drawings of the different goals that your child would like to achieve or have.

Here are some steps on how to help your child create his or her own vision board:

1. Plan a special time to sit down as a family.

2. Have each family member make a list of all the goals they would like to achieve or have or be. Here are some questions that may help your child to come up with some of his or her visions:

• What kind of house would you like to live in?
• What kind of car would you like to drive?
• What kind of clothes would you like to wear?
• What places would you like to visit?
• Would you like to have a private jet or space ship?
• What kind of boat would you like to have?
• Who would you like to meet?
• Who are the people you would like to hang out with?
• What about your body, how healthy would you like to be?
• Are there any sports you would like to be good at?
• Are you interested in the arts, is there anything that you
  would like to achieve there?
• What kind of person would you like to be? Would you like to
  be more confident?
• Would you like to be more kind?
• How much money would you like to be earning every month,
  automatically?
• Which charities would you like to make a huge impact on?
• How many children would you like to have?
• How many and what kind of pets would you like to own?
• What does your future spouse look like and what kind of
  character is he/she?

3. Now get some old magazines or look online for photos (just make sure to set the search engine to ’safe search’ mode first before asking for any photos or else you may have your child seeing photos that you would otherwise not like them to see.) I recommend using www.Google.com photo search or www.flickr.com.

4. Let your child have some fun being creative and encourage them to dream BIG!

5. Now choose a spot to hang the board where your child is most likely to see it many, many times a day.

6. Every morning have a look at your child’s vision board and go over their goals by having them say out loud,

“I am so happy and grateful now that I have ….built my dream house….. and/or…..filled my
closet with the most beautiful clothes…..and/or…… I am the best player on
my school’s baseball team….helped 50 people on my favourite charity by giving them the opportunity to eat healthy food….etc.”

The key is to have them say it as if they have already accomplished their goals and dreams.

They need to make their subconscious minds believe that their goals have already been achieved to make it become a reality. No one is ever successful until they absolutely believe from the depths of their souls that they are a success already!

It’s amazing how this simple vision board can make your child’s dreams a reality.

It serves as a constant reminder of why they are doing what they are doing to achieve their dreams. It will help them keep their focus when the rough days approach.

I highly recommend that you also create your own vision board.

Being a role model really makes a huge impact on your child. They will take their vision boards much more seriously if you also have one. And it’s fun to see your dreams as if they have already happened!

I recently found a website www.ActLikeARichKid.com that havecreated a system for you to make your
vision boards turn into a movie that really makes your dreams come to life! I have used them to create my own mind movie which I watch every morning when I wake up and every evening before I go to bed. The movies use moving photos and emotional music that really bring your dreams to your heart centre.

Here, watch mine to get an idea:

As you can see in my mind movie above, I created that one for my whole family, my kids love seeing their new bedrooms and are constantly asking me to watch our mind movie. My 6 year old daughter has even come up with a business plan because she wants to have a water bed, so she’s decided to start up her own face painting business to pay for it!

The power of the law of attraction and the usage of vision boards and mind movies is absolutely incredible.

Have fun, and let Jenny and I know how successful your own vision board and mind movie become!

Cheers…..Amanda van der Gulik….Excited Life Enthusiast!

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FREE E-BOOK: “50 Easy Ways for Kids to Make Money”

To claim your free copy, visit: www.TeachingChildrenAboutMoney.com

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I have had an email this week from Andrew Ong of the Money Tree program in Asia. Their kids work in teams to create businesses, and he wanted to know whether the entry had to be an individual, or whether a group could enter.

Good question!

Yes, absolutely, if your business is a partnership or group effort, you can still enter the competition. Just make sure that all your names are in the video.

Actually, for everyone, it is a good idea to put your names in the tags as well, so we know how to spell your name!

We’re looking forward to seeing the videos from the Money Tree program participants in the next couple of weeks.

On the HubPages side, there is a great Hub about some of our competition entrants, written by their mother, Charly. It is full of information, stories and hints about getting your kids set with good money habits. Check it out!

If you are a member of any of these social bookmarking sites, remember to drop by and vote for the competition post:

Cash-Smart Kids at Mixx

Educational YouTube Competition at Digg

Cash-Smart Kids YouTube Competition on Reddit

Careers Cash-Smart Kids Competition at Propeller

Cash-Smart Kids Competition News at Newsvine

CashSmart Kids Video Competition Story on Plugim

Cash-Smart Kids YouTube Video Competition on Marktd

Congratulations to all those who have entries in so far, and we look forward to seeing these new entries that I keep hearing about!

Until next week …

Molin Upper Elementary School Principal Dave Archambault asked faculty and the business community a simple question: “What happens when you inspire more than 75 fifth-grade students to create an invention or new business idea?”

On Friday, Archambault was pleased with the answer.

“This is great — we have a lot of great ideas,” Archambault said.

From eyeglasses fitted with windshield wipers to clear one’s view in a rainstorm to a “sweet flavored gum” that was claimed to have the ability to bring about world peace, the second annual Young Entrepreneurs Contest showcased students’ creativity.

The contest, sponsored by the Newburyport Education and Business Coalition as well as teachers Ellie Bailey, Mary Ann Daley and Carol Snow, included special exercises for students to go along with teaching students about business and sociology.

David Strand, president and owner of Strand Marketing, was brought into the Molin School to assist in creating and presenting the ideas that inspired entrepreneurship and encourage fifth-graders to come up with their own ideas about business.

Read the rest of the story in The Newburyport News.

I love hearing about initiatives such as these.

Gradually, ever so gradually, the traditional education system is being infiltrated by little bursts of entrepreneurial spirit.

These kids participated in simulations, where some of them played the role of bankers, some the rols of suppliers, and others represented retailers. Once a supplier had “won” the business of a retailer, the young retail entrepreneurs then had to persuade the bankers to finance their purchase of the stock.

These simulations are a fantastic way to provide kids with a solid learning experience when it comes to business concepts. We encourage the families in our Cash-Smart Kids program to engage their kids with “mini” business situations and simulations whenever possible.

Kids are remarkably creative – I loved the description of one young inventor’s product, the “my-Cod”. This fish-shaped contraption would allow swimmers to listen to their iPods through a swimming “fish” broadcasting when placed in a swimming pool.

I really think that one would be a goer!

Companies are always on the lookout for new customers, and they know that the younger they can get a consumer, the more likely they are to keep them for a long time. Particularly worrying for parents these days is the way cell phone and credit card providers are targeting teens.

Even debit cards can cause problems – my fourteen-year-old saves half of her earnings religiously into a high interest account. Once she had a debit card, though, and was being paid by direct deposit, she found that she had overspent her budget without realising, and didn’t have the full amount left that she had meant to transfer into her savings account.

Cell phones just chew through money, a few cents here and a few cents there for text messages or listening to voicemails, and suddenly the bill is enormous, or the prepaid card runs out long before the end of the month.

Credit cards are the worst of all, because it is so easy to build up a debt that you can’t repay all at once, and the interest rates on those things are so high it’s amazing they are legal. Once you get behind, you just get further and further behind.

Load up a high school or college kid with a cell phone and a credit card or two, and you can undermine the foundations of their financial life completely.

Student loans are bad enough, but many kids just shrug and add a bit of credit card debt on top, figuring “in for a penny, in for a pound”. We live in an instant gratification society.

Credit cards have become a fact of life on college campuses. With a reported $13 billion in discretionary income, college students represent a huge market for credit card companies (Kara, Kaynak, & Kucukemiroglu, 1994). Students often receive incentives, such as t-shirts or mugs, to apply for cards, and requirements, such as previous credit history, are often waived (Kara et al, 1994). Due in large part to these marketing efforts, a recent study reported that approximately 70 percent of college students possess at least one credit card–a number much higher than previously thought (Manning, 1999), while another study reported that 93 percent of college seniors have acquired at least one card (Markovich & DeVaney, 1997).

With companies lining up to seduce our kids into debt, the only protection we can offer them is a good, solid financial education, and a grounding in good money habits.

Images by PT, The Consumerist and B Francina.

Big news today!

We have been asked to extend the deadline for the competition.

It seems that the publishers will want some involvement in the process, so we will be extending the deadline to July.

This will give some of those American candidates who have ‘no time” a chance to use the first week or summer vacation to get the video done!

Those who had entries in before the end of May will get Brownie points for that, but we will not close the competition to new entries until July.

As before, we will give you at leave seven days notice of the closing date, so all you “last minuters” can get off your duffs and submit your entries.

Last week, 14 year-old Carl (The Kid Blogger) Ocab posted news of the competition out to his email list, and a couple of hundred people came to the Cash-Smart Kids website to read the rules. I am expecting a flood of entries in the near future …

One of the great ways for kids to make money is through busking. Of course, it goes with out saying that you need to make sure that the parents know where the kids are, and what they are doing, and that the situation is safe.

There are lots of safe and pleasant places to be busking, but sometimes people ask me whether it is a “real” money-making idea, or just a bit of fun to do one or twice and then forget about it.

I will say this – it’s not for everyone. If you can’t play an instrument, and have a singing voice that sounds like someone strangling a swan, then you are not likely to get far as a busker. However, for those who do have some talent, busking is a great start to an entertainment business.

I would like you all to meet Declan Galbraith, as he explains how he made 200 pounds the first time he tried busking, and where that busking led (yes, he’s just nine years old in this interview).

Declan is now sixteen, his voice has broken, and he is well on the way to global stardom as he works his way through a million-pound, three-record deal with EMI.

Here’s what he looks and sounds like today.

He has already made the transition that plagues many young male singers – the whole breaking-of-the-voice drama – and come out the other side still glowing.

My daughters are all besotted, and that can only be a good sign, since they are smack dab in his target demographic. His choice of songs to cover gets the parents in, too, I have to say!

He has learned how to play guitar and piano now, and is starting to write his own songs – another sticky step for former child singers. See what you think of this song, off his latest album, which he wrote himself.

My prediction is that he will continue to go from strength to strength.

Most of us have heard about the longitudinal study of Yale graduates conducted in the late 1900s. Researchers followed a graduating class through their entire working lives to age 65, and generated the following statistics.

By age 65, 36 out of 100 people had died. Now these days, with modern medicine, and extended life expectancies, that number may well be lower, but we can expect the proportions among the rest of the categories to be about the same.

Just 1% (one in a hundred) people were wealthy at age 65. Just one in a hundred Yale graduates – what would the statistic be for those who didn’t have a university education, I wonder?

Another 4% were financially independent. That is, they had passive income (income they didn’t have to work for) which was enough to comfortably cover their living expenses.

That accounts for 41% of the total sample.

The other 59% were in financial trouble. Some just had to keep working, because they couldn’t afford to stop. Others were dependent on government hand-outs or the charity of relatives.

More than half!

Do you think those fresh-faced young graduates believed that more than half of them would be struggling financially at age 65? Do you think any of them, through their working lives, planned to be broke, or dependent on others, in their retirement?

Of course not. They were as optimistic as we all are today. We all confidently expect to be financially OK, just like they did. We’re all working hard, paying off mortgages, and saving for retirement, like they did. And we are headed for the same kind of statistics as a result.

The situation for today’s workforce is no easier than it was for the Yale class of ‘32. If anything, times are tougher. Fuel prices are higher, work is harder to come by, and less secure, and financial traps like credit cards and upside-down mortgages have come into existence.

While it’s daunting to think that we, who are of working age now, are likely to find ourselves facing similar statistics – or being similar statistics – when we reach the age of 65, have you ever stopped to think about the other impact of lengthening life expectancy?

Not only will we have to come to terms with our own successes and failures in financial management sooner than we think, we will also live to see the effects of our parenting in the financial successes and failures of our children. We will, many of us, live to see our children reach the age of 65 – financially independent, or still struggling.

What are you doing, right now, to ensure that your child is one of the successful few?

(Photo by pedrosimoes7)

Last week, I was interviewed by LifeTips Radio about the YouTube competition, and the charity book project. Amanda, the interviewer, had seen some of the early entries, and she was very impressed with you!

You can listen to the LifeTips Radio Interview with Jenny Ford online for a limited period, and some time soon, when Carolyn gets around to it (hint, hint), the audio file will be available as a download from the Raising Entrepreneurs site, too.

I understand what it’s like, getting these videos together – I was planning to have Rachael do a sample entry (obviously she can’t actually enter, since she’s related to a judge, but I thought it would be good to have a sample available for people) and with one thing and another we still haven’t edited and uploaded it!

Maybe this is a form of karma, and when I get Rachael’s done, the rest of the world will suddenly finish theirs off and upload them, too!

I have had emails telling me to expect some, but they are not showing up on YouTube when I search for “cash smart kids”. So, if you HAVE uploaded an entry, and you haven’t had a reply from me, it means I haven’t seen your entry. Check the tags!!!!

My daughters will probably hate me for this in the end, but I have to keep talking about the things they say!

As they get older, they are encountering money situations more often, so I get more opportunities to hear how they think about money. I have to admit, sometimes I am just blown away by what comes out of their mouths.

Our oldest quit her job at McDonald a few months ago, in favor of a career in internet marketing. Her current ambition is to be a copywriter. But she has had a few health challenges, which have slowed her down from acting on most of her grand plans, and as a result, her cash flow has been dramatically reduced.

A friend of mine was asking her how she’s coping with her financial situation, and she came out with the following profound observation.

“I’m poor,” she said. “But I’m not really poor. I’m only poor in the sense that I don’t have any money. I’m not poor in the sense that I have no way to get money.”

How good is that?

It is such a profound statement that I am still impressed, two days later.

She is completely un-stressed, even though she can’t do the things all her employed friends are doing. She knows that money is available, if she really wants it. The sense of security in that awareness is absolutely priceless.

Whatever she does with the rest of her life, it will not be shaped by a sense of powerlessness and desperation. She has enough entrepreneurial attitude to find ways to make money, wherever she is in life. If she is not making money, she knows that is her own choice, and not the tyranny of an uncaring Universe.

This sense of self-reliance is something that most adults lack, let alone kids of fifteen.

Hearing this quiet confidence makes us realise that the effort we have put in over the years, teaching her about money, has all been worthwhile.