Helping the Grandkids with Financial Literacy

One of the periodic features in Retirement Watch is focused on ways to help grandkids. I rarely see anything about that in other publications, though I know that a number of grandparents regularly look for ways to help their grnadkids. That’s why I was attracted by this article from The New York Times. It points out, as I have, that the best gift grandparents can give is financial insight or knowledge, what the article calls financial awareness. It does a good job explaining why and how.

“Grandparents are looking for opportunities to interact with their grandchildren, so why not add financial literacy to their repertoire?” said Susan J. Bruno, a certified public accountant and co-founder of CollegeDivaCFO.com, which aims to educate college-age women about financial matters. “They want to be taught. It just has to be relevant in the moment.”

Most grandparents, she said, have an advantage over parents: They can talk more freely with their grandchildren and, in return, their grandchildren tend to open up to them.

The fear, of course, is that grandparents are going to meddle and make life more difficult for their adult children. This can certainly happen — just as easily as grandparents can give their grandchildren all the big-ticket items that their parents say the grandchildren themselves should be saving money for. But many busy parents need someone to help them.