I think this is important and hence I picked it from USNews & posted to my blog to share with you guys -:
"The stupendously tragic events we've seen unfold in Japan might have you glued to your TV. As people evacuate from their homes, they aren't carrying anything with them. They have no pictures, financial documents, or laptops. They're happy just to be alive.
[See 10 Ways to Boost Your Social Security Checks.]
But eventually these people are going to need to rebuild their homes and lives, most likely without any of their financial records. Clearly, nobody could foresee or adequately prepare for what has happened over the last few weeks. But along with the more important life lessons, this devastation brings home the importance of having your financial records available and accessible no matter what."
Here's how to set up your financial life in case disaster strikes your family.
1. Know what you need. Here's a list of important documents you need to have available.
--Investment statements
--Bank statements
--Credit card statements
--Your living trust or will
--Income statement
--Balance sheet
--Property tax statements
--Mortgage and HELCO statements
--Last 2 years tax returns
--Last 3 years monthly budget tracking
--Retirement account statements and list of who your IRA beneficiaries are
--Records proving you own assets or have money owed to you
--Records proving you've paid off debts
--Term life insurance, whole life insurance, and liability insurance policies or statements
2. Put these records together. Assemble all your financial records in one notebook for easy access. You can discard old records as new documentation comes in. For example, if you are keeping your last two years of tax returns, you'd destroy the return for 2008 as soon as you have your 2010 return available. In the spring of 2012, you can destroy the 2009 return and keep 2010 and 2011. Update all your financial records this way. Simply keep the new statement on file and destroy the oldest record you are keeping.
[Visit the U.S. News Retirement site for more planning ideas and advice.]
3. Scan. If you don't have a scanner, you should save up and buy a good one as soon as possible. It will save you tons of storage space and a huge amount of time when you need to access your financial information. Feed your entire notebook into the scanner and have it safely scan your documents in a manner of minutes.
4. Secure it. When you scan your documents, you'll probably scan them to a pdf file. When you do so, you can password protect each document. This is a must.
[See Why Tax Deductions Aren't Always a Good Thing.]
5. Copy and distribute. Make a copy of this data and get it encrypted and password protected. Then, send it to a relative in a distant location. The farther away your relative lives, the less likely you both are to be impacted by the same natural disaster. In addition, you can pay a service to store your records online.
Nobody knows when disaster might strike their family. Copying and protecting your financial information will make it easier to rebuild your life in the aftermath.
一个最普通女人的心情日记; 也许普通却不乏趣、或许滑稽却能激起一滴心底的涟漪? 起初也许无趣,看一下吧,您或许有其它的想法也想与我分享?
The "Seas of Dreams" ~ 欢迎您来到 “海的绮幻之界”
“海的绮幻之界”是深沉浩翰的大海 ~ 进来这海的怀抱:
您的梦、您的想法或希望、您的计划、您的心情与感想,无论乐或悲,我们一块儿来分享笑与泪吧!
There are 7 Seas that were known to us in our World. Huge, Deep, Dangerous & Dark, but it cultivated all Marine Lives, and it is LIFE itself. Millions of People on Earth have dreams "with" the Seas, like a Mother, it takes everything, anything you gives, including "rubbish".
This is the site where you can share your EVERYTHING....
A site I'll like to build to make you really think on certain life topics. It's funny how much people like to just write, communicate, and learn new things. I think that's what I'm trying to accomplish: A blog where people shared their interesting daily life's stories, even literatures, poems, movies, dramas, scripts, arts, comments of anything that happen around them or their Countries, the World, personal thoughts & emotions be it happiness or sorrows, your darkest secret(s)...
The Seas will endure them all...
Pages
Monday, April 11, 2011
Easy Ways to Teach Your Kids Managing Money
Despite a hefty load of teaching duties from potty-training to self-feeding, parents are apparently willing to take on another major task: Passing on money skills. According to a new survey from ING Direct, the vast majority of parents say they are in charge of their children's financial education. But parents don't give themselves high marks as teachers. Fewer than one in three think they're "excellent" financial role models.
So, what's a struggling parent to do? Here are eight easy ways to start teaching your children about money today:
[In Pictures: 10 Smart Ways to Improve Your Budget.]
Get over the awkwardness. The ING Direct survey found that parents feel more prepared to talk about drugs, alcohol, and sex than money. Maybe we just need a family-friendly analogy for the money talk, like the birds and the bees. Whatever trick you use, find a way to bring up dollars over the dinner table, or wherever else you make conversation with your kids.
Use other people's lesson plans. You don't have to do all the hard work yourself, because other people have done it for you. Mymoney.gov, AmericaSaves.org, ING Direct's Planet Orange, and SchwabMoneyWise.com are just a few of the websites designed to help parents educate themselves, and their children, about the ins and out of money.
Practice one financial tip a week. Arkadi Kuhlmann, chief executive of ING Direct, recommends picking one financial tip each week, such as setting up a budget, and talking about it as a family. That way, parents can also make an effort to set a good example, too. At the grocery store, they can take a minute to explain how to choose an affordable brand of dishwasher detergent, or how to compare the cost of bread.
Connect allowances with future careers. Paying children for chores around the house can lead to problems, because it teaches them that working for money isn't fun, warns Alisa T. Weinstein, author of Earn It, Learn It: Teach Your Child the Value of Money, Work, and Time Well Spent. Instead, she recommends connecting allowances with tasks related to various careers. Children can choose a career, and then complete tasks related to that career. Travel agent tasks include reporting on a destination in an appealing way, creating a brochure, and for older children, calculating exchange rates.
"This way, the child is making the connection between effort and money, and the feeling that you worked hard for something. If you can capture that, then you're much more likely to have a child who grows up and can find emotional and financial fulfillment in their careers," says Weinstein.
Show kids what you can do with money. Susan Beacham, co-founder of Money Savvy Generation, invented a piggy bank with four compartments--save, spend, donate, and invest--to teach kids how to budget. "You're teaching them to stop, pause, and reflect, and this is the first step toward teaching them to delay gratification," she says.
Watch out for the subtle messages you send. Mary Ann Campbell, a financial educator, received mixed messages about money growing up. Her parents, in fact, implied that sending a girl to college was a waste of money, so she had to find a way to pay for her own education, along with the help of one of her brothers. That's one reason Campbell wrote her PhD thesis on how 20-somethings learn about money from the way their families talk about it. She discovered that the way parents and grandparents talk about money, as well as the way they act, makes a big impact.
While most of her 20-somethings learned about frugality and saving, the interview subjects who didn't have the benefit of those lessons--either because their parents spoiled them or their parents seemed to struggle with money themselves--repeated some of those same bad habits. Her students, she says, often didn't even realize how much their parents had influenced them until she started asking them questions.
Let them make their own mistakes. Lewis Mandell, a finance professor at the University of Washington who has studied financial literacy, says allowing children to experiment and make mistakes can provide more useful lessons than anything taught in school. He encouraged his now-grown daughter to invest as a teenager; she learned how to diversify after losing money in Pepsi stock.
[See 12 Money Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes.]
More independence can be good for parents, too, who often help their adult children so much that they hurt their own financial security. Most college graduates now say they plan to move back home, at least temporarily. A Pew Research Center study released earlier this year found that 36 percent of Millennials receive money from their parents or other family members. One Ameriprise Financial survey found that almost one in three parents in their 50s and 60s often give so much money to their adult children that it eats into their own retirement savings, but most don't even realize it.
As they get older, limit the support you provide. While assistance during those challenging early adulthood years can help adult children find their footing, parents can inadvertently set up a cycle of dependence. If your money ends up going towards frivolous purchases like vacations and cars, you should probably freeze those payments. But if you're helping a hardworking son or daughter afford an internship in an expensive city, there's little reason to hold back, other than your own budget. If you can't afford financial help, consider giving in other ways, by offering the occasional home-cooked meal, babysitting services for grandchildren, or even just a listening ear.
Teaching kids about money doesn't have to be complicated. Instead of technicalities like 401(k)s and bonds, they can start to grasp broader concepts like the importance of saving for a rainy day, spending less than you earn, and how money can grow over time. And if parents are still struggling to apply those lessons to their own bank accounts, they can use the opportunity to change a few habits of their own.
extracted from USNews
So, what's a struggling parent to do? Here are eight easy ways to start teaching your children about money today:
[In Pictures: 10 Smart Ways to Improve Your Budget.]
Get over the awkwardness. The ING Direct survey found that parents feel more prepared to talk about drugs, alcohol, and sex than money. Maybe we just need a family-friendly analogy for the money talk, like the birds and the bees. Whatever trick you use, find a way to bring up dollars over the dinner table, or wherever else you make conversation with your kids.
Use other people's lesson plans. You don't have to do all the hard work yourself, because other people have done it for you. Mymoney.gov, AmericaSaves.org, ING Direct's Planet Orange, and SchwabMoneyWise.com are just a few of the websites designed to help parents educate themselves, and their children, about the ins and out of money.
Practice one financial tip a week. Arkadi Kuhlmann, chief executive of ING Direct, recommends picking one financial tip each week, such as setting up a budget, and talking about it as a family. That way, parents can also make an effort to set a good example, too. At the grocery store, they can take a minute to explain how to choose an affordable brand of dishwasher detergent, or how to compare the cost of bread.
Connect allowances with future careers. Paying children for chores around the house can lead to problems, because it teaches them that working for money isn't fun, warns Alisa T. Weinstein, author of Earn It, Learn It: Teach Your Child the Value of Money, Work, and Time Well Spent. Instead, she recommends connecting allowances with tasks related to various careers. Children can choose a career, and then complete tasks related to that career. Travel agent tasks include reporting on a destination in an appealing way, creating a brochure, and for older children, calculating exchange rates.
"This way, the child is making the connection between effort and money, and the feeling that you worked hard for something. If you can capture that, then you're much more likely to have a child who grows up and can find emotional and financial fulfillment in their careers," says Weinstein.
Show kids what you can do with money. Susan Beacham, co-founder of Money Savvy Generation, invented a piggy bank with four compartments--save, spend, donate, and invest--to teach kids how to budget. "You're teaching them to stop, pause, and reflect, and this is the first step toward teaching them to delay gratification," she says.
Watch out for the subtle messages you send. Mary Ann Campbell, a financial educator, received mixed messages about money growing up. Her parents, in fact, implied that sending a girl to college was a waste of money, so she had to find a way to pay for her own education, along with the help of one of her brothers. That's one reason Campbell wrote her PhD thesis on how 20-somethings learn about money from the way their families talk about it. She discovered that the way parents and grandparents talk about money, as well as the way they act, makes a big impact.
While most of her 20-somethings learned about frugality and saving, the interview subjects who didn't have the benefit of those lessons--either because their parents spoiled them or their parents seemed to struggle with money themselves--repeated some of those same bad habits. Her students, she says, often didn't even realize how much their parents had influenced them until she started asking them questions.
Let them make their own mistakes. Lewis Mandell, a finance professor at the University of Washington who has studied financial literacy, says allowing children to experiment and make mistakes can provide more useful lessons than anything taught in school. He encouraged his now-grown daughter to invest as a teenager; she learned how to diversify after losing money in Pepsi stock.
[See 12 Money Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes.]
More independence can be good for parents, too, who often help their adult children so much that they hurt their own financial security. Most college graduates now say they plan to move back home, at least temporarily. A Pew Research Center study released earlier this year found that 36 percent of Millennials receive money from their parents or other family members. One Ameriprise Financial survey found that almost one in three parents in their 50s and 60s often give so much money to their adult children that it eats into their own retirement savings, but most don't even realize it.
As they get older, limit the support you provide. While assistance during those challenging early adulthood years can help adult children find their footing, parents can inadvertently set up a cycle of dependence. If your money ends up going towards frivolous purchases like vacations and cars, you should probably freeze those payments. But if you're helping a hardworking son or daughter afford an internship in an expensive city, there's little reason to hold back, other than your own budget. If you can't afford financial help, consider giving in other ways, by offering the occasional home-cooked meal, babysitting services for grandchildren, or even just a listening ear.
Teaching kids about money doesn't have to be complicated. Instead of technicalities like 401(k)s and bonds, they can start to grasp broader concepts like the importance of saving for a rainy day, spending less than you earn, and how money can grow over time. And if parents are still struggling to apply those lessons to their own bank accounts, they can use the opportunity to change a few habits of their own.
extracted from USNews
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