A Sneak Peek into The Money Academy Camp

It’s rare that you hear your kids say things like, “I feel more responsible in my own life,” but that’s the kind of thing kids say coming out of The Money Academy, an Austin educational camp that provides kids with a chance to run a business and keep the money they make. In fact, it’s exactly what one of our campers, Trevor said. But why did he say it? Well, this week we’re going to let you take a peek into the week of a Money Academy camper.

Day 1: The Business Plan

Kids meet their fellow business owners. Through fun games and activities, they come together as a team. They each get assigned an accountability in the business for the day. (They’ll switch roles each day.) Monday’s CEO leads the meetings. They work out things like how to work as a group, what accountability is, and how to create a business, all the while having tons of fun. On day one, kids say things like, “We don’t talk about this in school.”

Day 2: Market Research and Revision

On day two of this remarkable Austin educational camp, kids test out their product on the market. They talk to customers and get feedback. They also learn how to deal with it when their team members don’t do what they said they would. They get excited about their product as they make it more sell-able. Today kids say things like, “We wanted to sell duct tape wallets, but actually, the customers want liked greeting cards the best!”

Day 2 and 3: Production

On these camp days, everyone is preparing for sales. Their interactions with the counselors might look like this:

12-year-old Counselor: “I noticed that the production department is using a lot of paper. Do you think that’s the best use of resources?”

9-year-old CEO: “No. And they keep playing around. We’re never going to get this done in time.”

Counselor: “Who do you think you could talk to about that?”

CEO: “The production manager.”

Day 4 and 5: Sales

On Thursday, campers start selling. They deal with when and how to sell as well as how to talk to customers. They deal with both failures and successes as business owners. They begin to take real ownership of their business and take initiative to get support, make revisions, and work problems out. By the end of camp day 5, kids say things like. “I acknowledge Brad for the way he talked to customers. He sold a lot of cards today!”

When they leave this Austin educational camp, kids leave with a check and so much more! They say things like “I learned how to be a leader and work with others.” Kids walk out with new confidence and memories that will last a lifetime. What better way to spend a summer?

Lessons From the Field: Kids and Money

Evan is proud of his new accountability.

by Janis Bookout

Kids are naturally curious about money. A while back, my husband and I were talking to our 7 year old, Evan, about chores. He said, “Can I get paid?” My immediate reaction was to say, “Well, chores are a natural part of being a family. We all pitch in because we all live here.”

Unexpectedly, my son’s eyes filled with tears. “But mom” he said, I want to buy something for myself and how else am I supposed to get money? I don’t want to have to ask you for it. But how else am I going to get it?”

It hit me like a brick. My son wanted to be responsible for creating and using income. What an opportunity and I was just about to miss it! All my training from the work I have done with The Money Academy came rushing to mind. I could hear Gayle’s voice in my head. “Give them something to be responsible for.” I don’t want my son thinking that money comes from me. That would not set him up for life at all.

So we talked about it and we came up with three ways that he could get money: 1) He could start a business; 2) We could give him an allowance; 3) He could be paid for doing a job at home. Personally, I was hoping he’d start a business. He’s done that once before and it was awesome! (Sold 20 CD’s of his music, netted $80, paid me back my loan of $35, and learned a LOT about money.) But this time he wanted to earn money through chores. But I still didn’t want him to get locked into doing a task for money. That’s not the future I want for him. So we made him the Living Room Manager. He is accountable for making sure the living room is clean by the end of every day. And he isn’t allowed to do the job by himself. The position pays $5 a week. He has agreed to put 10% in savings, and he has a bank bag and a ledger to keep track of his money. (Anyone who has done The Money Academy will find some of these things every familiar.)

What an opportunity I almost missed!  As a parent, it’s so easy to stop listening. But then when I do listen, there are these crazy-great moments in time where my kids ask to be developed in something. Money is one of those areas where kids just naturally want to step up and learn—if we let them.

Evan will be doing The Money Academy summer camp for the first time at the end of the summer. I’m really looking forward to hearing about what he’s learning and accomplishing. Oh, and my five year old, Ryan, is the car manager. It pays $3 per week. He loves telling us all to take our trash out of the car. And the car and living room haven’t stayed clean this long in years!

*Janis is a staff writer and registration manager for The Money Academy.

What does the financial future look like for college kids?

Time Magazine recently wrote of the rising college debt that kids are leaving college with.  On top of a heightened unemployment rate, we must prepare our kids to create their own jobs.  Entrepreneurship and small business creation is on the rise and will be what pulls us out of the recession.

It is of utmost importance to teach kids about how business and money work and give them the tools to create financial stability for themselves in the face of troubling economic times.

Here’s an excerpt from the Time article

College Graduates Face Record-High Debt In the Age of Record-High Unemployment

The news just keeps getting worse for college graduates. According to a report out today from the Project on Student Debt, college seniors who graduated with student loans in 2010 owed an average of $25,250—the highest level ever recorded and a 5% increase from the previous year.Those debt-carrying graduates also faced an impossibly tough job market, as unemployment for new college graduates hovered at 9.1%.  Add to that the fact that the average debt total doesn’t include for-profits institutions, which often saddle their students with much more debt than a traditional college, as too few provide the data to be included in the study — meaning that the state of student debt is likely much worse than we know. The debt figures add weight to the push to curb skyrocketing student debt.

Start preparing your kids to be Money Smart while they are young so they can navigate the economic challenges they will face upon college graduation.

Give kids real-life, real-money experience from a young age.  Support them in exploring money through doing business projects, selling their outgrown toys, doing chores for neighbors, or anything they can do to raise money.  Then, most importantly, help them start saving to invest a portion of their money.

Money camp gives kids itch to get rich

By Jay MacDonald • Bankrate.com

    Gayle Reaume bears absolutely no resemblance to Donald Trump. Her eager-beaver entrepreneurs don’t have BlackBerrys, tattoos, entourages or egos the size of Cleveland.

But Reaume accomplishes what “The Celebrity Apprentice” can only dream of: She makes learning about money fun for kids.

Each summer, the founder of The Money Academy and her merry band of counselors oversee more than a dozen weeklong camps at merchant locations in the Austin, Texas, area. Camps serve kids ages 8 to 18.

Call it “The Apprentice: Summer Camp Edition.”

The counselors help the kids form a basic business structure, complete with chief executive officer, chief financial officer, marketing director and sales manager. Then, they set them loose to develop a product or service and seek their fortune. The kids rotate positions so each can feel the heat.

“Monday, they’re out doing market research to determine what their customers would want to buy,” Reaume says. “By Tuesday, they’re prototyping. By Wednesday, they’re selling, doing financial statements every day, looking at profit and loss.

“They’re getting hands-on experience with money and how it works in the real world.”

Any money they make, the campers get to keep — after expenses, of course.

“I’ve never had a camp not make money because we let them learn from their experience,” Reaume says. “We let them fail. We don’t go in and tell them, ‘Make this product.’ We don’t even give them very much feedback. We don’t want to take away any of the opportunities for them to make a mistake.”

Snap, crackle and pop

Forget lemonade stands; these kids want a real piece of the action. They’ve hit the bricks with everything from hand-painted, earth-friendly canvas shopping bags to lavender bath products to organic potted herbs.

One group of teenage boys even gave lunch-hour massages to the downtown cubicle crowd at $10 a snap, crackle and pop.

“They had people come in and show them how to do foot, hand and neck massages,” Reaume says. “They had twinkle lights and Enya playing in the background and towels and warm tea. High school boys! And they made a lot of money.”

What would success be without a few hard knocks? One of Reaume’s favorites involved selling live ladybugs at an organic nursery.

“They researched and found out they could buy like 50,000 ladybugs for cheap,” she says. “The nurseryman said if you keep them cold, they don’t fly. Well, they don’t fly, but they’ll crawl! So we’ve got these little boys running around screaming with ladybugs crawling up their sleeves and pant legs. Hysterical!”

Accidental money guru

Reaume, a single mom who worked in publishing, hardly set out to become a money guru. She admits she couldn’t even manage her own finances until she joined an investment club in the mid-1990s.

But when her daughter Evan A., then a second-grader, asked to start a pint-size investment club with her friends, Reaume figured she would teach them all about it. Instead, she spent a year and a half listening to and learning from them.

The more she heard, the more she realized that kids have a natural curiosity about money. Unfortunately, money is still not a topic for discussion in most homes, and schools have failed so far to crack the code on financial education, much less figure out how to make it fun.

“Kids don’t need the kind of information that is available through most curriculums. It’s adult versions of things that have been ‘dumbed down’ to kids, and it’s not what kids need to know,” she says. “It isn’t useful to them.”

Reaume has seen the benefit of financial education in her own daughter. At 15, Evan A. manages her own career as a budding singer-songwriter but keeps it real by collecting income at the candy machine she installed years ago at Austin’s legendary Shady Grove restaurant and music venue.

True to the entrepreneurial spirit of its summer camps, The Money Academy’s curriculum stands apart from the crowd because it started with the kids.

“So many companies in the marketplace are trying to generate curriculum, but they’re so far behind the curve,” Reaume says. “We’ve got five years of development on them. We’re in a really good space to put in something that works phenomenally well. Not only that, it goes home and the kids teach their parents.”

That sure beats coming home from camp with a case of poison ivy.

Blog Radio Interview on Kids and Money

The best way to have more security with your money is to increase your confidence and knowledge around it.  Money Academy Founder, Gayle Reaume, was a recent guest on the show.  Join Financial Woman radio host Camille Gaines as she shares money and related topics that will inspire and motivate you to not only own, but embrace your financial journey.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/btrplayer.swf

Listen to internet radio with Camille Gaines on Blog Talk Radio