How To Change Your Member Settings in FamZoo

We’re producing a set of short How-To videos for embedding within the FamZoo application. Here’s our first one: “How To Change Passwords, Sign-in Names and Other Member Settings”:

Got feedback? We’d love to hear it.

National Money Night Talk: Car Costs 101

Click to enlarge.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, tomorrow is the National Money Night Talk event. The materials on the site include an exercise for High School age kids called “Car Costs 101”. It’s enlightening.

One way to bring the exercise to life is to capture it in a FamZoo budget. Click on the image to the right to see the weekly, monthly, and annual costs for a teen purchasing and driving a typical used car.

It’s pretty eye-opening (if not eye-popping)!

A few things I learned along the way:

• Car registration fees vary wildly by state. Check out this study put out by the state of Idaho for 2008. Some serious variance there!
• Teen car insurance is insanely expensive. You can get a general sense from this bar chart.
• California leads the pack in gas prices (OK, no surprise there). You can see average prices by state here.

This Thursday is National Money Night

This Thursday, September 16, is The National Money Night Talk event presented by American Express and finance expert Jean Chatzky. The idea is to sit down with your kids and have a discussion about personal finance basics. The goal: improve the odds of them enjoying a better financial future. Sounds good!

They’ve collected a set of nice resources for parents on the site that include videos, talking points, and exercises. The resources are conveniently organized by age level: middle school, high school, and college.

If you’re a FamZoo family, you’re probably already living many of these discussions in a hands-on way. For example, the middle school exercise “Let’s Set Some Goals” maps nicely to Savings Goals and the Savings Planner in FamZoo. It involves a discussion about how long it takes to save for a new bike with varying levels of weekly saving.

Here’s how to experience the exercise in FamZoo:

Check out rest of the materials on their site, and, if you aren’t already doing it, make sure you have “The Talk” with your kids. (Yeah, sure, you should have that other talk too, but that’s outside our area of expertise...not to mention our comfort zone.)