“Working to help parents raise money-smart kids.”
Happy New Year!
In this first Chief Mammal Memo of 2021, let me say that I hope I’ve lived up to my promise to provide you with three ideas to share and save with each newsletter over the past year. Thank you for being a part of this grand experiment (parents who want to raise money-smart kids).
We have a big, new project coming out this quarter, and I’ll be writing about that here soon. In the meantime…
— 1 —
How We Are Giving. Inspired by the Effective Altruism movement, we focused our end-of-year giving on trying to do the most possible good with our charitable donations. We gave to the Against Malaria Foundation and have set up automated donations to the Effective Altruism fund for 2021. For more information, listen to Will MacAskill’s TED Talk or, for more detail, Will’s conversation with Sam Harris. It’s a shocking fact that an effective charity can increase the helping power of your Share jar by over a hundred fold.
— 2 —
Most Popular. It was a virtual dead heat for the most popular posts on our site this year. One was my longer essay, “Why Is Financial Literacy Important and What Every Parent Needs to Know About It.” The other was much more specific — “How Much Allowance Should I Give My 12-Year-Old?” The second post inspired me to create an interactive page on our upcoming Art of Allowance Project about what parents can do to promote financial literacy with their kids at any age. More on our new site soon!
— 3 —
How Credit Scores Work. The most common question I’m asked when I tell people that I help parents raise money-smart kids is, “Do you have something for someone my age?” My answer is typically that there are plenty of good resources. Another customary question that any of us mere mortals ask about finance is, “How the heck do credit scores work?” I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a better (or certainly more animated or interesting) way to understand them than this graphic. I hope it helps.
I wish you the best in 2021.
John
