“Saving Money” by Mary Firestone, A Primer for Saving

Recently I was at our town library with my six-year old son. I saw a copy of “Saving Money,” a slim easy-to-read book that I thought might make for an interesting review on the blog. Assuring my son that it wouldn’t count against his book limit of five, we checked it out and brought it home.

It’s never too early to teach the principles of financial literacy to children.  However, this book doesn’t cut it, and here are four reasons why:

The concepts are too simple for a child old enough to read on his/her own, and yet it doesn’t define or elaborate on the more challenging words.  For example,  it says that “Saving lets you buy more costly items without borrowing from others,” without defining “borrowing” or discussing any of its implications, such as the implied requirement to pay it back or interest.

The use of boldface font is confusing. Initially I read it as emphasis, and then I realized that the boldfaced words are included in a glossary in the back of the book. For example, “She needs $1 to buy milk at school. Dora also wants to spend $1 at the arcade.” Seems like a good opportunity to talk about needs vs. wants, but the subject is never directly addressed — not on page 4 nor in the glossary.

The activity is lame. It spends an entire page describing how to label three jars for saving money: Share, Spend, and Share.  No interesting chemistry with coins, or penny-powered cars.

It’s expensive. Granted it’s a hardback, but Amazon clocks it in at a spendy $21.26 which works out to about $1/page.

Momma told me to always find something nice to say, so  I did learn one thing from this book:  historically, the clay used to make jars for storing money was called “pygg” clay.  Over time, the name morphed into “pig,” or “piggy,” and this is why the porcine shape is used to this day.  Sounds apocryphal to me, but the same fact was found on Wikipedia, so, hey, it must be true, right?

For my money, Schoolhouse Rock does it better with “Dollars and Sense.”  It’s a toe-tappin’ country western tune about how a girl dreaming of Nashville decides how to buy a guitar (gee’ tar) and amp.

Carnivals: This post was included in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance#243: Valentine’s Day Edition hosted at Get Rich Slowly.

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Tags: book review, financial literacy, Mary Firestone, saving money, teaching children financial responsibility