3 Tips for Unleashing Your Kid's Inner Entrepreneur

Take a look at your beautiful child. Now, close your eyes. Imagine your child 20 years from now in a professional setting. What do you see?

Is he an anonymous corporate drone slouched in a desk chair hidden among a vast sea of cookie-cutter cubicles? Is he sheepishly cowering before The Boss? Is he bored, uninspired, counting the seconds to 5pm? Is he playing it safe in a dull job while secretly dreaming of running his own show?

Or...

Is she huddled with her team to brainstorm on the latest killer idea? Is she her own boss taking charge of her own destiny? Is she motivated, inspired, waking up early to put her great ideas to work? Is she taking calculated risks and bouncing back from inevitable setbacks as she turns her professional dreams into reality?

I’m betting it’s more like door number two.

Now, connect the dots. Is there something you can do as a parent to help open that door for your child? Perhaps you can plant the seed by giving your kid an early taste of the entrepreneurial spirit. How? Help your child launch a micro-business.

Are you game? If so, here are three suggestions to keep in mind.

Connecting the Dots Between Money and Work for Your Kids

Where does money come from? That’s a silly question — just ask any little kid and you’ll get the obvious answer:

“It pops out of a machine that my mom visits.”

“It lives on a magical card in my dad’s wallet.”

“It comes from my mom’s iPhone.”

Uh oh...

The American Dream vs. The Me Dream: Family Finance Picks #75

“Life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

That’s a definition of the American Dream supplied by James Truslow Adams in 1931. The American Dream is the common thread running through this week’s family finance picks. Read on to delve into these deep family finance questions:

• Are today’s 20 somethings engaged in the American Dream or the Me Dream?
• How do we encourage the spirit of entrepreneurialism in our kids that is so central to the notion of the American Dream?
• Is our society even equipping kids with the basic financial capabilities required to participate in the American Dream?

Teen Freelancing, Allowance Experiment, Money Anxiety: Family Finance Picks (#52)

Here are my top three kids & finance picks from around the web last month:

Son’s Free-Lance Car Wash Idea a Throwback to a Different Era

by John Bogert on dailybreeze.com

I’m a huge proponent of teens getting summer jobs. A summer job is a critical skill and character building experience. It’s also a terrific excuse for parents to collaborate with their teens on one of my favorite family finance tips: the “Family 401(k).” That’s why I’m so dismayed by the increasingly dismal work prospects for teens these days. As John points out in his column, teenagers with enough “hormonal energy to power a small aircraft carrier” are a “bad bunch to have sitting around doing nothing.”

Yes, sadly, teen jobs are scarce, but maybe our teens just have to get a bit more aggressive about creating their own opportunities. John’s son did. Read about his free-lance car wash experience here.

July carnival of Natural Parenting: Making an Allowance

by Crackerdog Sam on Hobo Mama

Sam shares the early results from his allowance experiment with his 4 year old son Mikko. The post includes wonderfully concrete examples of how an allowance, when used properly, can help teach good money habits. The pictures are cute too. My favorite quote comes at the end:

We learn by doing. We teach, best, by coming alongside during the process.

I love it — well said and perfectly aligned with the FamZoo philosophy.

Read about Mikko’s early allowance adventures here.

My Kids Are Freaked Out About Money

by Kathryn Higgins on The Faster Times

Kathryn shares the anxieties her children feel about money and how the downturn in the American economy has fueled their fears. While there is unfortunate anxiety, I find most of her kid’s money perspectives extremely laudable. It’s a touching, thought-provoking piece. Read it here.

We’re constantly scouring the Internet looking for articles related to family finances and teaching kids good personal finance habits. You can visit our ever growing list of family finance bookmarks here. We’re up to 1,756 now!

Can Your Bored 9 Year Old Help You Run Your Business?

Ahhh, summertime...

9 year old son: “Dad, I’m bored. Do you have any jobs for me?”

Dad: “Ummm, not unless you’ve got some Internet marketing skills I don’t know about.”

9 year old son: “What’s Internet marketing?”

Dad: “Nevermind...”

Hey, wait a minute. My son can read, he’s savvy on the computer, and he’s pretty darn smart (if I don’t say so myself). Maybe I actually can use him on some of my Internet marketing tasks if I factor the work properly.

For example, one of my more routine tasks is to scan a daily automated Google alert for decent articles related to teaching kids good money habits. I add the good hits to our library of bookmarks and leave comments if I think I have some value to add to the article. Finding the good ones means sifting through the alert and filtering out hits that aren’t truly relevant or ones that are just blatant instances of nonsensical keyword stuffing. My 9 year old is certainly capable of making those judgement calls.

All I have to do is devise a simple system for him to identify the good matches and relay them to me. So here’s what we’ve come up with:

• I copy the contents of each Google alert I receive into a Google Docs document.
• My son reads the title and summary for each hit and, if necessary, drills down to the full article to determine whether it’s a good hit.
• If it’s a good hit, he highlights it in yellow for me.
• He let’s me know when he’s done, and then I just concentrate on the handful of highlighted entries for further curation.

Here's what it looks like when he’s done:

It’s been a win-win-win-win-win:

• He isn’t bugging because he’s bored
• He’s saving me time
• He’s exercising his mind
• He’s earning some dough (so he can blow it on Crowns for Wizard 101)
• He does quality work for a very low wage

Maybe summer isn’t so bad for FamZoo after all.

How about you? Can you find a clever way to put your kid to work on something you’re trying to accomplish this summer?

IRS Free File Program: Perfect For Teens With Summer Jobs

To minimize tax filing hassle and expense, I usually just include the modest income from my kids on our own tax return. But this year, my teen had a nice summer job with a fair amount of withholding. I decided to look into the cheapest, easiest way to file his own tax return, so he could cash in on his refund. As a “starving” college student constantly bumping up against his budget, he could definitely use the extra beer pizza money.

I googled on “file taxes for free” and stumbled upon the IRS Free File Program. It’s a partnership between the government and commercial tax software companies that was created to encourage more Americans to file taxes electronically. Through the partnership, tax prep companies like Intuit offer versions of their online tax filing programs free of charge to eligible filers. The teen with a typical summer or part time job will probably meet the requirements.

I’ve been a user and fan of TurboTax for many years, so I was delighted to see that they participate in the program with the TurboTax Freedom Edition. I was able to breeze through the program in about 15 to 20 minutes and file my son’s federal and state returns to collect his refund. Unfortunately, California does not sponsor a Free File Program, so we were dinged $14.95 for the state filing, but that didn’t dip into his refund too much.

Here’s a step-by-step slideshow:

The bottom line:

$203 Fed Refund + $34 CA Refund - $14.95 Filing Fee = $222.05

Nice windfall. That’s a lot of beer pizza! For my son, it was all pizza from the past though — the full $222.05 went toward paying off the loan I gave him for his Spring break road trip. Easy come, easy go.