Paper or Plastic?: The Secret Life of Money: A Kid's Guide to Cash by Kira Vermond

What's the difference between consumption and consumerism?

You know the feeling. You're walking through the mall, minding your own business, and BAM! Out of the clear blue sky some wonderful whatchamacallit beckons. In no time flat, your nose is against the glass, you body feels all tingly-and you're dreaming about how much better your life would be if you just had that thing.

Most of us love money--having it, counting it,
exchanging it for stuff we want. Handling money is something else. Except for the fortuitous few who happily grow up to become financial advisers, the rest of us do a mental cringe when it comes to thinking about budgeting, saving, investing, using credit, and the whole financial planning thing. Next to The Talk, talking about money with kids one of the hardest jobs parents have, one that goes on virtually as long as the parent-child relationship lasts.

But unless we go back to a barter society (and nobody wants that), learning to deal with money maturely is essential to everyone's education. Kira Vermond's The Secret Life of Money: A Kid's Guide to Cash (Owlkids Books, 2012) takes a light-hearted but thorough look at the world of finance, from the piggybank to the World Bank. Vermond's breezy, kid-friendly text hits just the right comic note, abetted by clever cartoon illustrations by Clayton Hanmer, taking on all the salient areas of money, from both a personal and an international view.

Money. It's a lot like apple pie....

People and Pie:

If they get their hands on a pie, some people will polish the whole thing off.

Others will eat a tiny slice and save the rest for later.

Some feel guilty after they eat even one little slice of that luscious pie goodness.

Others demand more pie..even when they've had enough.

What is money, honey? A good example of the social contract, in which a chunk of something (anything from cowrie shells to printed paper) represents labor performed and value agreed upon ahead of the transaction. What's the downside of winning the lottery? Everybody wants to share the wealth! What's the upside and downside of plastic credit? A whole lot from both points of view. What is compound interest and how does it work for or against you? You'll be oh-so-sorry if you don't know!

Balancing needs and wants is at the heart of the role of money, and Vermond uses humor as her main weapon in overcoming resistance to money talk in a lively narrative that is actually fun to read. Sidebars, featured pull quotes, and salient illustrations appropriately executed in green, break up the text while actually extending understanding, as the author takes on the full spectrum of the financial world, from the history of money, to banking and stock trading, investing in your own talents, working for wages or for yourself, to the causes of poverty and the perils and rewards of investing and altruism. This slim little book makes informative reading even for the older and wiser, and as personal advice or as a guide to middle school units, it's right on the money.

"Casual yet comprehensive, this informative guide to money presents the basics behind earning, saving, and spending wisely, while providing a crash course in economics," adds Publishers Weekly.

From Cowrie Shells to Silver Certificates: Show Me The Money: How to Make Cents of Economics by Alvin Hall

"If you were on a desert island, no amount of money would help you survive--you couldn't eat it, drink it, use it to build a shelter, or to keep away wild animals.

So why is money valuable?

The answer is simply that everyone has agreed to it."

When you think about this last sentence, it seems remarkable that a planet full of diverse and opinionated people like us could agree on such an abstract concept as modern money, or as author Alvin Hall describes it, a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. In his Show Me The Money (DK Books, 2008) Hall recounts this truly remarkable process, starting with the history of barter, and describes how livestock, jewel stones and shiny metals (e.g., silver and gold), cowrie shells, valuable objects such as tools, and at last coins, imprinted with graphics of these icons of trade, came to stand in for the value of goods and services themselves. After all, people are sometimes lazy and indecisive, and coins are certainly more portable than cows and less given to spoilage than a sack of grain, giving people the chance to carry their symbolic trading medium around and postpone their purchase until they were sure they were getting the best price for what they wanted.

With this thorny concept out of the way, author Hall goes on to explain in short, pithy text boxes such modern-day money matters as supply and demand, banks, stock exchanges, credit cards, and capitalism. Moving on, he discusses coinage, printing of paper money, counterfeit, and emerging means of exchange, such as debit cards, gift cards, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and electronic credits (see PayPal!)

Of course, all this exchanging of forms of moola mean that someone has to actually perform some service or produce something of value in order to receive these rewards, and Hall doesn't slack on his discussion of work and of its anxiety-inducing alternative, investing!

There is much more to money--the choices between spending, stashing, or speculating and the perils of each (being busted, encountering inflation in price and thus deflation of the value of your stash, and the perils of getting the biggest return for your investment.) Although he stops short of explaining credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes, Hall takes the middle reader much further into modern economics than most authors have dared.

Shopping tips--look at what you're spending, not what you're saving by buying on sale; recognize the difference between needs and wants; and comparing the long-term gains and losses from money use--round out the discussions of personal finance. Hall then moves on to discuss matters of international economics, fair trade versus free trade, Keynesian versus Friedmanic philosophy, and the up and down cycles of global business. He even ventures to look at the world of work in 2020, ("The Way We'll Work") when his readers will be becoming part of the world's economy as producers.

Typical of Dorling Kindersley's design style, there are no long chapters, subdividing into sub-subjects, and no long gray blocks of text. Instead, bright photos and graphics dominate every page and subject sections are limited to double-page spreads. Still, Hall manages to cover a lot of ground, hitting the high points of economics and grounding them fairly firmly within the experiences of his intended audience. A brief biographical section, "And the Winners Are..." features current superstars who have taken good ideas and hard work into the realm of riches--Ben & Jerry, Tiger Woods, Bill Gates, Charles Schulz, J.K. Rowling, etc.,-- and a "Who's Who" of economics which briefly cameos theorists such as Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman, to name a few. Show Me The Money Show Me The Money makes an enormously complex subject lively and appealing to its targeted reader. As School Library Journal puts it, "Hall's presentation of this sometimes dull topic is remarkably vibrant.... [his] approach is distinctively eye-catching without sacrificing accuracy."

Money Matters: Raising Money Smart Kids by Janet Bodnar

It's the time of year, with holiday bills still coming in, taxes not far ahead, not to mention the market going down like a deflating party balloon, that money is on the minds of us grownups more than we'd like.

But how about our kids? Do they have a grasp on the concept of cash flow? Janet Bodnar's much hailed Raising Money Smart Kids: What They Need to Know about Money and How to Tell Them (Kiplinger's Personal Finance) takes on those money matters--the thorny issues of teaching kids to respect, spend, save, and ultimately earn money sensibly. Bodnar, who writes Kiplinger's "Money Smart Kids" column, begins with a tough test for parents, "Test Your Money Smarts." Here's a sample:

Your 14-year-old son has been saving half of his allowance and mony earned from neighborhood jobs. Now he wants to use the money to buy an expensive iPod. You
1. allow him to buy it.
2. offer him your old turntable instead.
3. tell him there's no way he can touch his savings.
4. buy it for him as a birthday gift.

Managing money is admittedly an intimate and subjective business. Bodnar does a good job of balancing parental needs and perogatives against the need for children to have the real-life, hands-on experience of spending, earning, and saving money before they go out on their own. Many of Bodnar's principals are not hard and fast; she advocates using personal judgment regarding your family's financial needs and goals and assessing the money style of your child as well as your own in fashioning your rules. She does have some strong beliefs, however. Advances on allowances are a No-No. Payment for good grades is unwise. Credit cards for children and teens are a BAD idea, except perhaps for rechargeable debit cards for college students away from home.

Bodnar believes that the main purpose of children's allowances is to teach them how to manage their money, how to save it for special purchases, how to resist impulse buying, how to shop for the maximum bang for the buck. She's no spoilsport. She believes in allowing children to spend their money in their own way (provided their purchases are safe) to inculcate the desire to work and to save for a reward and to let them learn from their early mistakes how to avoid big ones later. For example, here are her five things 10-year-olds should know about their own money:

1. They will have to pay for their own movie tickets, snacks, and other expenses (except for school lunches) out of their allowance.
2. They will not get an advance on their allowances.
3. They should be able to navigate a grocery store with a list and bag a bargain or two.
4. They should have a savings account in a real bank--and they should understand that although they can withdraw money, it won't be the same cash and coins they put in.
5. They will not get everything they ask for.

Bodnar threads her way through the pitfalls of allowances, 'tween and teen status symbol purchases, home chores (paid and unpaid), savings, interest, and investment, neighborhood jobs, early teen work, late teen and college student independence (almost), dealing with divorced parents and doting grandparents, and boomerang graduates who move back in after college--all with both common sense and a sense of humor. Raising Money Smart Kids: What They Need to Know about Money and How to Tell Them (Kiplinger's Personal Finance) has been called "the best resource for parents trying to raise kids with the ability to cope financially and succeed in our society."

One of the best nonfiction books for kids themselves is Neale S. Godfrey's Ultimate Kids' Money Book, which snappily covers all the money basics, from barter to stocks and bonds in a colorful, kid-pleasing format, well illustrated with humorous cartoons and plenty of "sticky-note" info-bits that summarize and nail down the concepts covered on each page. Explanations of complex ideas such as supply and demand, banking and business plans, inflation and recession are delivered in scenarios which are familiar to elementary and middle school readers. A four-page glossary reinforces the vocabulary developed in the text and an excellent index makes the book usable for casual readers or report writers alike.

For younger readers there are many picture books which deal with money management. For the youngest readers, there's Rosemary Wells' wonderful Bunny Money (Picture Puffins) in which big sister Ruby's wallet, fat with saved-up money for Grandma's birthday present, grows progressively thinner as Max picks out candy-filled vampire teeth for Grandma, drips syrup all over himself, and has to have his clothes washed at the laundromat (at Ruby's expense) before they finally settle on affordable gifts for the birthday girl. Wells provides endpapers with copyable "bunny bucks," humorously depicting rabbit versions of celebrities as diverse as Desmond Tutu and Julia Child, so that children can print their own medium of exchange to practice their bunnynomics.

For slightly older kids Judith's Viorst's classic spendthrift story, Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday shows her favorite fall guy Alexander (yes, that Alexander) frittering away the money his grandparents give him on their Sunday visit. Alexander is absolutely going to save his money for a walkie-talkie, except that impulse purchases (a one-eyed bear and a used candle) and sheer mishap with his money (down the toilet and into cracks) reduce his pocket change to bus tokens--again!

For beginning readers, Lillian Hoban's Arthur's Funny Money (I Can Read Book 2) "does the math" with Arthur and little sister Violet as they try to open their own sidewalk business. At Accelerated Reader level 3.1, this "I Can Read" book gives the early independent reader a chance to get a good giggle and an education in basic economics at the same time.