Money-Smar t
Holy
JUNE 2016
Families
June 2016 | 1
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Contents From The Editor ............................. P. LOVING GOD IN A MATERIAL WORLD
4
Marilyn Rodrigues Cover Story .................................... P. RAISING MONEY-SMART KIDS
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Evelyn Bean Love and Marriage ......................... P. RESOLVE YOUR MARRIED MONEY WOES
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Byron Pirola Testimony ..................................... P. MONEY AND TRUE FINANCIAL FREEDOM
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Fr Tony Percy and Cathy Harris Lifestyle ........................................ P. 40 JOY-RAISING LEMONADE CUPCAKE STALL Marilyn Rodrigues Seasonal Notes................................ P.50 SACRED HEART OF JESUS AND FIRST HOLY COMMUNION ACTIVITIES, RECIPES, PRAYERS
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From the Editor Marilyn Rodrigues Loving God in a material world Our financial attitudes and behaviours form a big part of our lived experience as we journey with God to the fullness of life. Thus our children will benefit hugely from formation in the Christian approach to money and wealth. We can guide them to properly appreciate money from a young age, and teach them to use this gift at the service of fostering their relationships, growing in virtue, and abiding in God. Evelyn Bean takes us through some practical ideas for raising money-smart kids. Fr Tony Percy, Australian priest and economics whizz, and entrepreneur mum, Cathy Harris, take us through the characteristically Catholic approach to money and wealth. Finally Byron Pirola has some advice for those with money woes in their marriage.
THIS MONTH June 2016 Wed 1 St Justin Thu 2 Sts Marcellinus and Peter Fri
3 Most Sacred Heart Of Jesus
Sat 4 Immaculate Heart Of Mary Sun 5 Ordinary Time 10 Mon 6 Sts Norbert and Marcellin Champagnat Thu 9 St Ephrem Sat 11 St Barnabas Sun 12 Ordinary Time 11 Mon 13 St Anthony of Padua Sun 19 Ordinary Time 12 Tue 21 St Aloysius Gonzaga Wed 22 Sts John Fisher & Thomas More Thu 23 St Paulinus of Nola Fri 24 Nativity of St John the Baptist Sun62 Ordinary Time 13 Mon 27 St Cyril of Alexandria Tue 28 St Irenaeus Wed 29 Sts Peter & Paul Thu 30 First Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church
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Raising
Money Smart Kids By Evelyn Bean Children can be taught to love things and use people or to love people and use things. Money is a most powerful created thing which can be used for good or ill. Parents are the number one influence on their children’s financial behaviours. It’s up to us to raise a generation of mindful consumers, investors, savers, and givers. Consider these ideas for teaching financial responsibility to children at home.
1. Give them an allowance Allowances can be a good idea if used properly. But if you give your children an allowance, and still fulfil their every desire you really are not teaching them how to make spending decisions. The allowance needs to be their money and the spending choices (no matter how bad) also need to be theirs. Start when they have a basic concept of money and can add and subtract. A good target amount is between $0.50 and $1.00 per week for each year of their age.
Help them divide the allowance into three parts:
• spend, for whatever they want now; • give, for the collection basket at Mass each Sunday; • save, for a larger purchase they want.
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2. Don’t pay for household chores Having responsibilities is part of living in community – even if that community is one young child and one parent. Each child needs to be assigned chores for which they are responsible.
The level of responsibility needs to increase as they get older. By the end of high school children should be able to manage their own needs when they need to– including cooking, laundry and clothes shopping.
3.. Let them earn extra money This is a great idea if the parents really treat it as a job for hire over and above their regular household chores. There needs to be some agreement about what gets done, when and how, and what the job pays. If they do not complete the job on time or if it is not done well, their pay should reflect that.
4. Don’t bail them out Experience is the best teacher so let the kids make their own decisions including bad ones. If they mess up, let them experience the consequences.
They need opportunities to learn from their mistakes. It’s better for them to make a bad decision with $20 of lunch money than a $500K house! Experience will help them make wise decisions, weigh different options, and comparison shop.
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5 Tips for clothes shopping Consider one of these suggestions, depending on the maturity of your child and how well they can handle money:
Give them a budget and coach them in comparison shopping and managing expectations.
For teenagers wanting expensive branded clothing agree on what amount you will pay as the base amount for an item and let them pitch in the difference themselves. These two methods are a lot different than the open-ended approach used by so many parents who just whip out the credit cards to buy the kids whatever they want. But your job is to raise children who will be responsible adults.
The world teaches children its way of handling money, which is contrary to God’s way. We have the responsibility to teach children God’s way of handling money. We can influence them toward the holy and moral or we can influence them toward the secular and worldly. This is an edited extract reprinted with permission
Deuteronomy 6:5-7 says “Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength. Take to heart these words, which I command you today. Keep repeating them to your children.”
from the Compass Catholic ministry.
Read the whole article here
About Evelyn Bean Evelyn Bean is the co-founder of Compass Catholic Ministries along with her husband Jon. They are both Commissioned Lay Ministers in the Diocese of Orlando, Florida. They have a passion for the message of Biblical financial principles, which they have been teaching for more than 25 years.
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Resolve Your Married Money Woes By Byron Pirola MANAGING PARTNER, PORT JACKSON PARTNERS CONSULTING FIRM
Surveys consistently show that having different approaches to the gaining and use of money is one of the top three challenging issues for couples. Why do so many couples find their money issues hard to resolve when budgeting is a simple skill that can be picked up by anyone? The answer is that our attitude and approach to money management is not simply about how we make and spend money.
In fact, arguments are usually about wanting the other person to honour our deeply-held values. Couples can find it hard to resolve differences over money because the question of how to spend and use their finances inevitably calls out differences in their underlying values about how to create and use family resources. Most of us formed these underlying values most strongly when growing up in our family of origin.
What are your money values? Money is for: Enjoying the things money can buy Accessing opportunities such as education and travel Security for myself and my family Gaining influence, power and status Escapism, retail therapy Feeling good about myself (self-esteem) Expressing love by buying gifts Helping others, having an impact Growing an inheritance and leaving a legacy
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The first trap couples fall into in resolving money differences is that they focus on the money question. This is a symptom, not a cause, of their differences. Without talking about the underlying value differences the money problem will never be resolved satisfactorily.
That’s why in our marriage preparation courses we teach value-based decision making which applies equally to money as it does to all other areas in a relationship. SmartLoving is an approach to relationships that gets more impact for less effort. Visit SmartLoving
Once couples have reflected on their individual money values and resolved their differences so that they can move forward happily, it might help them to start with these basic steps:
1. Keep a Budget Budgeting is a skill anyone can pick up or improve upon. It’s very difficult if not impossible to save without a budget. There are many different forms and lots of options emerging in software and apps so find one that suits you best.
2 Minimise Lifestyle Costs Most of our money over our life time goes into our small daily running costs. Over a 30-year working life, buying two cups of coffee every week day will chew up a staggering $75,000 of pre-tax income.
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3. Ask Yourself What It Really Costs Consider the lifetime costs of the things you buy, not just the upfront costs. One car might be similar in cost to another, but will cost lots more in ongoing costs such as insurance, petrol consumption, or more expensive parts.
5. Save Use a high-interest account that isn’t easy to access, to reduce the temptation to dip into it.
4. Be Careful With Debt Debt is very useful, but few kinds of debt are sound. A mortgage is an example of a good one as a home is worth more over time (an appreciating asset), as long as you can comfortably meet the repayments. People get into problems quickly when they go into debt (often high-interest credit card debt) to live beyond their means making purchases that are purely consumption items such as holidays, clothing, and gifts. All debt, especially the latter kind, should be paid off as fast as possible.
About Byron Pirola Byron is the Managing Director of management consulting firm, Port Jackson Partners. He and his wife Francine are the authors of the SmartLoving Series and have been leaders in the area of marriage enrichment and preparation for more than 20 years.
i information For more about valuesbased decision making for couples Learn more
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Money and True Financial Freedom Is there a Catholic approach to money? The short answer is yes, it’s a God-given tool for us to use at the service of true human freedom and friendship. Fr Tony Percy and Cathy Harris, take us through it from their different perspectives. Fr Tony is a priest of the Canberra-Goulburn archdiocese and author of the book Entrepreneurship in the Catholic Tradition. Cathy is the co-founder of Harris Farm Markets, business and equal opportunity leader, and mother of five.
Fr Tony: Money is a wonderful thing. It helps
Fr TONY PERCY
us to get the basic necessities of life such as housing, food and education. It is the main modern-day means of exchange and if you look a bit deeper it ultimately is for enabling communion between people. For instance when you invite a person to your house for a meal, you are usually inviting them to not only have a meal but also to grow your friendship. Now that can’t take place unless you have money. Of course money can be a means of division but that’s only because we pervert it with sinful attitudes. We have to look at created things sensibly and realise that their origin comes from God. Therefore we should always thank the Creator for them and use them responsibly. In the classic text on money, 1 Timothy 6:10, it says that ‘The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” An excessive love of money is damaging. It leads to our enslavement. The Church’s teaching is that we have a right to private property; we have a right to goods including money. And the Church makes a really important distinction between the possession of something and the use of it. We have to own things as if everyone else owned them; we have to use them as if they are for everyone, with a generous spirit.
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Cathy Harris:Money is an essential ingredient
CATHY HARRIS
of life and its sustainability. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with money. One of the nice things about having money is that you can help people who are less fortunate than you are in ways that can really make a difference. Lots of wealthy people are philanthropists. But when you’ve been brought up as a Catholic, giving is not just about giving money. It’s about true sacrifice and love. It’s seeing those amazing nuns who go and look after poor people in India communities for absolutely no reward whatsoever, they just give out of the generosity and love of their heart. But it’s important that projects like those are financially sustainable as well.
Growing up in a Catholic family it was all about love, charity, giving back, and not being wasteful… you’re surrounded by a sense of giving. It’s just the culture of the Catholic Church that you’re surrounded by the whole time. My own kids saw [growing up with our family business] that it’s how you treat people, with equity and fairness, which is so important, not simply making money. This article is excerpted from the 2016 issue of Frankly Magazine
Frankly Magazine click here
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Joy-Raising Lemonade Cupcake Stall By Marilyn Rodrigues Last year one of our daughters and her friend, nine and 10 years old at the time, ran a stall to raise money that they later divided up into church giving, saving, and spending. Try our idea for a cupcake stall the kids can set up themselves to practice raising funds while spreading some joy at the same time!
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Location, location They made a brisk trade in our driveway selling homemade chocolate chip cookies and lemonade to passersby over a couple of hours while my husband or I took turns doing some chores out the front of the house. We stayed within sight and earshot of them, but otherwise left them to it. Hearing them chatting with neighbours, joggers, and people walking their dogs about what they were doing and why was very sweet! So was the way they negotiated either free goodies or a percentage of their takings to the siblings who helped them.
Introduce or reinforce safe habits We told the girls they were not allowed to call out to people or passing cars. They were not to approach any person or vehicle or to leave their spot at the stall for any reason without our knowledge and presence. They were to only keep enough money with them for change; the rest had to be sent inside with us or a sibling helper. For food safety hair was tied back when cooking, and tongs and serviettes used for serving biscuits.
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Get the recipes Go online, look through cookbooks. For super easy cupcakes try this hack: METHOD: 1. Mix one cup (250mls) of lemonade with one packet of cupcake mix (340g packet). 2. Whisk to combine, spoon batter into 12 cupcake cases. 3. Bake for around 20 minutes at 180C.
Set the prices Keep in mind what people will consider reasonable. Also what will the set-up cost be? Our daughter paid us out of her earnings for the lemons and chocolate chips we bought so she could do the stall.
Make a sign Clearly setting out the products and their prices. It should be eyecatching and large enough to be seen from some distance away.
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Add some bling, and some extra joy! Use this opportunity to share the joy of knowing Jesus with our joy cake toppers. Download template cut them out and attach each one to a toothpick to insert in the cupcakes.
Cupcake templates
About Marilyn Rodrigues Marilyn is the editor of CathFamily and mother of five. She also writes regularly for The Catholic Weekly newspaper and blogs at marilynrodrigues.com
Check out our Facebook Page to see our kids’ stall and show us your own photos! June 2016 | 29
Seasonal Notes
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Activities, Recipes, Prayers Most Sacred Heart of Jesus PRAYER
Litany of the Sacred Heart Ancient prayers, still relevant today.
RECIPE
Sacred Heart Muffins A yummy way to honour the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
REFLECTION
Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus The feast explained!
First Holy Communion PRAYER/ CRAFT
First Communion Cards Fast ways to make a meaningful gesture for a child's First Communion.
CRAFT
Communion Colour-In Is there such a thing as too much colouring in?
Š 2014 Marriage Resource Centre Australia This handout is one of a series of information sheets designed to help families develop traditions that encourage faith and family life. It may be reproduced for non-commerical purposes. www.cathfamily.org Making the home the heart of the Church
CRAFT
Eucharist Bleach Banner Simple craft activity for home or school.
For more ideas and inspiration visit www.CathFamily.org
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Pre-Orders available
Amor The Joy of Love
A special limited print edition featuring Pope Francis' exhortation on Love in the Family - Amoris Laetitia. It contains key excerpts from the document, stories from real people, and commentary. While stocks last. For more information and orders Click here