This month’s issue of Money Matters magazine (page eight) has an inspiring story for all teens. If I were still doing Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers with my daughter, I’d add it to her assignments for the week.
It’s the true story of a young newlywed couple who has been married for less than two years, has no debt and has $50,000 in savings, all due to their joint effort to manage their money responsibly.
He has a college degree, and she has a one-year technical degree. Both worked their way through college and graduated without debt. Their goals for the future include a large family, a paid-off house and ample donations to missions. What a great example for all young people!
Money Matters is published by Crown Financial Ministries, the organization that Larry Burkett helped start. Listening to Larry Burkett’s Christian financial radio show helped encourage my husband and me as we worked toward becoming completely debt-free, a goal we achieved (not on our own, only with God’s help!) in 2002. Do check out Crown’s site while you’re there.
I’ve been using Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers with dd17 for the past 18 months or so, and we’re almost finished. We’ve been having a lot of fun with the projects.
Funny how using Life Prep has been a different experience with each of my children.
Our eldest was very eager to get out on her own, so we emphasized the rent, food and utilities projects over the others. Our son was completely college-minded, so we stuck to more reading and less projects. Dd17 is not in a big hurry to be out on her own, but she’s not sure about college either (she’s already racked up a few credit hours and isn’t sure if she wants to keep going), but she really gets into all of the projects.
She has run a couple of small businesses, so she understands the need to watch your expenses and make prudent choices. She seems to really get into studying how loans work, and how you can save a lot of money by prepaying them.
While working on the projects from the book, she enjoyed playing with some online financial calculators at Bankrate.com. They’re wonderful! I plan on adding mention of them to the next edition of the book when we update it again in a few years.
Today dd17 and I worked together on the Tax Project found in Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers.
It’s a weird feeling, teaching my child out of a book that I wrote. But I wrote it eight years ago, and that’s long enough that I sometimes forget the author’s identity for a second 
We sometimes get questions from people asking how old a teen should be to do Life Prep. We respond that it depends on the teen, their goals and which project in the book is being considered.
For instance, a 14-year-old boy will find the Car Project (link goes to free download of this project) a lot more interesting than the Credit Card project, just because most boys of that age are eagerly looking forward to having their own cars.
In the case of the Tax Project, we tell people to wait until their teen has a job that generates a paycheck. There’s nothing like receiving a check for less than you earned (because of taxes, Medicare, and Social Security) to get your attention. It’s amazing how that event can arouse a teen’s curiosity about taxes (primarily why they’re so high!)
Since dd17 has been earning paychecks since last summer, this was a great time to do the Tax Project. Add the fact that it’s time to determine if she needs to file a tax return for 2008, and she was more than eager to do the project. There’s nothing like a receptive student, is there?
It all went well, and only took a few hours. However, I learned that one part of the Tax Project has changed since I wrote it. In the book, I referred to a little pie chart inside the IRS’ 1040 booklet that showed exactly where our tax dollars go. That pie chart is gone, and I could not find it on the IRS web site.
However, I did find a simplified version of it in an IRS Power Point pdf (see page 5). It may be simplified, but it’s as depressing as ever. Dd and I had a good discussion about that, too. We homeschoolers are so fortunate to have the time to teach our teens about these things before they leave home.