An Opportunity To Bridge Generations
George Gagliardi of Coromandel Wealth Management in Lexington, Mass., is another advisor who wants to include children in financial literacy discussions. He has been an avid reader of Ron Lieber’s “Your Money” column in The New York Times and hands out an assortment of books to his clients about money, including Lieber’s parental guidebook, The Opposite of Spoiled. This is a marketing tool, Gagliardi says, and “a way to educate people in a gentle, simple way.”
Danielle Howard is a financial advisor in Basalt, Colo., who services the Roaring Fork Valley area. She’s been working with an organization called Youth Entity and its program, “I Am Financial Knowledge.” She has taught classes for fifth and eighth graders in the program.
“I always felt that there is a need for financial literacy among the younger years,” said Howard, who has children. “To see their faces and the lights go on in their heads when they start getting it and they get excited about money in a healthy way ... you’re making an investment into the future of your community. It’s a beautiful thing.”
Mitchell Kraus is a financial advisor and the co-owner of Capital Intelligence Associates in Santa Monica, Calif. His practice includes legacy planning in which advisors focus on multigenerational wealth planning, philanthropic planning and socially responsible investing.
“A lot of studies say that financial education is very hard to teach in the classroom, and it’s not taught with real-life examples in family life,” said Kraus, who started focusing some of his advising on the younger generations.
He hands out children’s books and also gives tips to parents on teaching their kids financial literacy. First, he said, he tells his clients to go shopping with their children. He took his own son to the local farmer’s market every week for him to buy flowers for his mother so he could be familiar with handling money and exchanging money for goods.
As his son got older, Kraus encouraged him to estimate what the tax would be for the things his son wanted to buy. And Kraus and his wife implemented a three-bucket approach where his son would divide his allowance into jars labeled “for later,” “for now” and “for others.”
“I’ve been giving the advice for years, but I’ve found that once I give a personal story with it, my clients listen a little bit more intently,” Kraus said.
This is a layering approach that helps his practice because the policy is that clients' children automatically become his clients, too.