Building Good Money Habits from Childhood with Davinia Tomlinson
Building Good Money Habits from Childhood with Davinia Tomlinson
💸As a young woman, do you feel like you received enough of a financial education to equip you with confidence as an adult?
Are you a parent of a young girl and worried about her lack of confidence when it comes to talking about money and one day, negotiating her salary?
Have you debated whether you should give your kids pocket money?
Today, I speak to Davinia Tomlinson - her mission with rainchq is to help women build financial resilience and sustainable wealth to live the lives they love. She is also the author of Cash is Queen. Her book aims to break down the basics of how young women can learn to understand and manage money. In this episode, we talk about the importance of financial literacy, figuring out your priorities in life and more.
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“There was a brilliant study that Starling Bank had done towards the end of last year, which revealed that parents that paid their children pocket money or the children who receive pocket money have a 25% higher financial literacy rate than those that don’t receive it.”
the importance of having a money guide for girls
Cash is Queen is a girls' guide to securing, spending and stashing cash. Davinia says it is her contribution to doing something to tackle the raging financial inequalities that women face when they reach adulthood by engaging young girls and teenagers very early on in their development.
There is a very sobering statistic that says that children form their earliest money habits by the age of seven.
Children learn so much about money from us by picking things up things by osmosis, so it’s important we teach them to have a healthy relationship with money.
For too long, women have been excluded from the discourse around money. The one glaringly obvious mission that Davinia noticed was missing was anything that was targeting pre-teens, which is why she wrote the book.
With all the various gender money related gaps that happen, it’s especially important that we address girls from an early age.
We need to talk to girls and motivate them around their money and help them to recognize that having a good grasp of their finances and solid financial foundations is the best springboard for everything that they might want to go on to do next.
We are conditioned to believe that it's not necessarily something that girls should be talking about or maybe we should be, whilst it may not be overtly said, that when you enter into a relationship that you perhaps should defer to your male partner or that should be his forte in heterosexual relationships.
While there definitely needs to be a book for boys about money, but perhaps it needs to be a book that would be centred around financial inequalities. Maybe reading Cash is Queen is exactly what younger boys need to read!
a few tips for parents
As parents, sometimes you can really feel like we're clobbered with so much advice. You're trying to do the best thing for them for yourself and not have a nervous breakdown at the same time. There's so much pressure on us all.
So, rather than this feeling like an yet another thing to add to the to-do list, we should think of it as in the same way as if we are investing in our own financial education, we're taking our children along on the journey with us.
It might be as simple as opening up a conversation around money. It’s quite revealing when you have any kind of conversation that is seemingly adult-like with our children, and you just throw out a very open question, like: what do you know about money?
Or, what do you think about money? Just see what comes up because they're quite entertaining but they're all so much cleverer than we give them credit for at times. They know things that we think they don't know already.
It’s useful to engage them around very practical things in the home, like taking them to a supermarket and helping them assess the prices.
Introduce the concept of a budget in a game-like, gentle way.
Pick and choose what works for you - our situations are different! As long as you introduce them to a concept that helps them feel like they’re in control of their money, whether that’s physical pocket money or a bank account for children.
The key is to make whatever you choose to do a relaxed and easy thing that doesn’t stress you or the children out.
There was a brilliant study that Starling Bank had done towards the end of last year, which revealed that parents that paid their children pocket money or the children who receive pocket money have a 25% higher financial literacy rate than those that don't receive it.
Have guiding principles that everyone is clear on - you don't have to have everything immediately. It's a hard lesson to teach, but what you're trying to do is to remind them that it will taste far better if you let it mature a bit then if you eat it straight away before it's ripened.
model behaviour and understand your values
Understand what is worth spending money on and what isn’t. Be open to talking to your children about the fact that different people value different things.
Don’t focus on what other people expect of you - focus on your own definition of success and happiness.
Ask yourself, what is your dream life and what steps can you take toward achieving it?
As Davinia says, “it’s about cultivating an existence that feels fulfilling and feels worthwhile rather than me just being a zombie.”
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Resources and ways to connect with Davinia:
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