SYM
My father’s financial education to his children consisted of SYM, Save Your Money.
We don’t have any extra money. Don’t ask. Save Your Own Money. SYM. It was such a powerful, consistent, and repeated comment that it was our family safety word (a big deal in the 80s when kids lived under the constant threat of being approached by strangers claiming their parents had been injured and we were to go with them to the hospital). In practice, we were supposed to stop and ask this stranger, “What’s the family password?” and only travel with them if they knew SYM.
This might have sounded crazy if we had really walked through the thinking now, but we all knew that, even if in an accident, my Dad could have been slipping in and out of conscience, but his last words would still have been “S-Y-M.” So, if some truck driver randomly pulled up and told me to get in the cab and uttered SYM, I would have gone.
At the end of the last century, it was enough to tell your kids to save their money and call it financial education. Today, that’s inadequate. Kids need to know to save for what? For how long? What savings method? When is it okay to spend? And how should I spend?
Questions, unfortunately, kids will not inherently know to ask us.
So, with my gaggle of nieces and nephews, I send them a quarterly newsletter that includes pop quiz questions to keep it engaging and relevant across age groups. Oddly, not all of my nieces and nephews are fond of sharing answers. It's shocking, I know.
As we learned SYM as Save Your Money, we actually learned an acronym. And personal finance is filled with them. And lucky for you, text messaging has made acronyms second nature. So among IRL, LOL, and IDK ask your kids if they know what IOU, IRS, or EOY mean. You won’t understand information if you don’t know the vocabulary being tossed about.
Money Mastery in Practice Activity: share some statements and see if your kids can find other acronyms. How about abbreviations? And how are they different? And what do those words mean in the context of money? Their money?
