As secondary education continues to get more expensive, teaching your children financial responsibility, as well as helping them out with the monetary burden of college, becomes crucial. While you always want your children to have it better than you did, teaching them how to budget and handle money is important not only in saving you some cash, but developing them as productive people. Here are a few simple way to get your child financially ready for university life.

1. Have Your Child Get a Job

Ways to Help Your Children Financially Prepare for College

Image via flickr by Waponi

You should have your child get a job in high school. This teaches him responsibility and how to make money. By the time he reaches college, don’t just hand over money. Offer to supplement his income for spending money, but only if he gets a part-time job.

Although college does require studying and class work, there is still a lot of downtime for your child to pick up a 10 to 20 hour a week job. By being employed and earning some of his own income, your child will learn to appreciate the money he gets.

2. Prepare a Budget

Before your child heads off to college, sit him down and show him how to make a budget. Demonstrate the differences between wants and needs and mention that he doesn’t have to pay for other people, be it food or entertainment. List all the different categories of expenditures and what percentage of his money should go to each piece of the pie. This will teach him not to overspend on frivolous things.

3. Utilize Apps

Smart phones offer quite a variety of apps to help money management become simple. Mint is just one of many free apps that allows you to view your bank accounts, income, and expenditures. It also has an alarm that goes off when you are reaching your spending limit. Because the younger generation is glued to their smart phones, why not give your child a constant reminder of budgeting if he is going to be on his phone anyway.

4. Teach About Investing

Often, parents will just give their children money or a credit card when they go to college, but this is actually counterproductive. If you feel you must hand over money, make it into a learning experience. Give them $500 to invest in stocks. The sooner they learn about the risks and benefits of the stock market, the better.

You can even make them read about financial investments. One such book is Fisher Investments on Materials, which can benefit both new and seasoned investors about the materials market, which is ever-changing and growing.

5. Take Out a Student Loan

While this may not seem like the greatest option, the learning value is incredible. Even if you don’t have your child take out a traditional student loan, have him pay you back some of the money. You don’t have to make him sign an official loan with you, just put forward all the information.

Your child will learn about interest and how to pay for a loan on a monthly basis. This will prepare him for the real world when he purchases a house or a car.

Teaching your child fiscal responsibility is a difficult task. But the sooner you teach him the ins and outs of handling money and meeting financial obligations, the more able he’ll be to deal with it once he is on his own. College is just the first step of taking off the training wheels.