We are passing our bad habits down to our kids. They see us spend but not save, pay bills or give to charity. You have to get your child involved in all of it. The only way to get money is to earn it. Make sure your handling of money is visible and simple for them to understand.

Like water dripping from a leaky faucet, a kid's constant nagging can be annoying and almost impossible to ignore, but giving in can have real financial consequences.

Kids have pristine records with no real credit score of their own. Parents generally don't think to monitor the status of their kids' identity. This is the perfect combination for children to be the easy targets of identity theft.

Shmootz is all around us. We all have areas in our lives that could use a little spring cleaning. Involve your children and make a family project out of finding -- and cleaning -- the shmootz in your life.

We have a very low success rate of saving in the United States, and we are passing this legacy of spending on to our kids. We need to see that our children are taught these skills so that they can grow up to be financially literate, and we need to start young.

The best way to make sure that your kids understand the reality that Money Doesn't Grow On Trees is to put them on an allowance and to teach them how to budget their money.

We want "kids to be kids," so money seems like a grown up topic that we can put off. It's easy to send messages that confuse our kids and harm the family's financial health -- but, you can change that.

Just reading the words teens and cars in the same sentence probably sends you reaching for an antacid. Unfortunately, that queasy feeling is well founded. The privilege of driving is costly, and teen driving can be dangerous.

Television. School. Osmosis. These are just a few of the ways that many parents would prefer that their children learn about finances -- as long as they don't have to bring up the sticky subject themselves.

When I brought up the idea of allowing our son to spend his $1 per week allowance on his favorite game, my husband was flatly against it. If our son doesn't hold the dollar in his hand and pass it over to a cashier or slip coins into a slot, how will he understand that the money is no longer his?

Not everyone is going to want to invest, but everyone should know how it works. It's one more thing that money can do, another part of the big picture of money as a life skill -- and it's an empowering skill.

It may sound like strong-arming to prevent your child from Armstrong-ing, but what you are doing is teaching your child real-life skills.

Everyone is tired of hearing the phrase "fiscal cliff" and you may think it's old news, so why should you explain it to your kids? Because it is a good opportunity to revisit your lessons on family finance and budget.

At some point, it will matter if Little Dude understands how money works, but it didn't have to be today.

Every Christmas season there are lighthearted articles and news segments on the current cost of the gifts in the carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas." I have compiled a practical, fun and sometimes whimsical list of suggestions inspired by the ostentatious gifts from the song.

For as long as people have been receiving gifts, some of those gifts have been regifted. The Magi brought the first Christmas gifts, and while everyone likes gold, I'm pretty certain the frankincense and myrrh were regifted.

If your child is constantly asking, "Can I have that?" and you're not sure when to say yes and when to say no, we have a solution.

We all know about kids being teased if they don't have the latest clothes or if they don't live in the most desirable part of town, but there is another side that goes mostly unnoticed.