Cashflow Blog

If you need a reason to set up a plan to teach personal finances to your children, a new survey from Charles Schwab Financial Services should give you the motivation. They recently gave a survey to 1000 teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 and came away with some findings that show that teenagers today have high expectations on what they believe they will be earning in the future:

Teenagers today think that they are going to make quite a bit of money. The average teenager believes that they will be earning an salary of $145,000 a year. Boys believe that they will be earning a salary of $173,000 per year while girls believe they will be earning $114,000 per year. This despite the fact that the average annual salary for a worker in the US is about $40,000 today.

According to the survey, teenagers in the US get most of their money from gifts given to them (54%) while over half (52%) say that they get their money by simply asking their parents for it when they need something. Close to one-third (29%) of teenagers already have some type of debt with the average amount being $300. This is a 23% increase from 2006 when the average debt owed by teenagers was $230.

Another findings from the survey was that teenagers say that they do want to learn more about personal finances so that they can make better decisions when they are living on their own. Obviously, the schools are not teaching these fundamental lessons to the children and so it is up to the parents to help educate their children about finances.

 

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Your Kid Thinks He’ll Make $173,000 A Year