Money Minded Families

11The Bucket Approach: Putting It All Together

As our children get older they move away from the piggybank and Moonjar and into the intangible world of bank accounts—a world that seems somewhat ethereal or otherworldly. Our money comes out of our hands and poof! is now somewhere else that we can't touch or see except on a piece of paper we receive once a month. Now, it is in fact somewhere, and if you are banking with a credible institution, is safe, but it certainly is a shift from seeing how much money you have in your hands to looking at an online bank statement or using a piece of plastic to get and spend those dollars. We take this for granted and have learned to accept this as the normal course of things. However, what many of us lose in this process is the discipline of separating our saving, spending, and sharing, because now all of our money is comingled. We no longer have our money in separate jars, each tagged to a particular purpose; now everything is in one big lump sum. Why haven't we carried those lessons from our physical piggybank into our virtual piggybanks—ease, simplicity, bank fees, and so on? It is time to go back to basics and mimic this bucket approach in the virtual world of banking.

I have seen more than my share of adults struggle with managing credit cards, debit cards, bank accounts, and the like. Additionally, I took for granted that my son Jacob would completely get the idea of the debit card. He has had a savings account for several years, as ...