Views From the Ville

(Be sure to check out all the other great Gift Guide items and giveaways here.)

Are your kids interested in finances?  Do they wonder how money is earned – and how to spend it?  Would you like to give a gift that’s not only fun, but educational, too?

If the answers to those questions are yes, then you may be interested in the products that make up the Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace for Kids line.  The products – which include books, a bank, and a kit full of items – help kids develop financial expertise in fun, easy-to-learn manner.

The book series is based on Junior, a young boy who learns the valuable lessons of giving, sharing, and spending.  There are six illustrated books in the series that cover lessons like “Junior Discovers Spending,” “Junior Discovers Work,” and “Junior Discovers Integrity.”  The books are also available in an audio format and come in an aluminum lunchbox with Junior and his friends on the front.

The Financial Peace Jr. kit comes with wet-erase boards to keep track of savings and commission; an activity book with stories and games; magnets for giving, saving, and spending; a kid’s sized calculator; envelope system; and an instruction manual for parents. The kit helps parents teach kids how to implement the principles they read about in the book series.

Junior also has a bank, divided up into sections for Giving, Spending and Saving, which lets kids apply in real life what they are learning. The bank features the characters from the Junior book series and is clear plastic so that kids are able to see their money grow. The kit is great, too; the activities

I think these products would be great for any kid who is starting to be curious about how money works. I especially like the bank with it’s separate sections. Teaching kids from a young age to set aside money for both savings and charity is an important lesson, in my opinion. I also enjoyed that everything was approached in a fun way, and not “oh-my-goodness-if-you-don’t-save-now-you’ll-wind-up-living-in-a-box-during-your-retirement” kind of way. Honestly, I would have loved to have had this set when I was a kid.

All items are available from Dave Ramesy’s website.  The set of 6 Junior books is available for $59.99; the audiobooks are available in a collectible lunchbox for $39.95; Financial Peace, Junior retails for $19.95; and the bank is available for $19.95. You can purchase all three as one set if you purchase the Kid’s Monster Pack which is on sale for $49.95 (save 58%!).

One winner will receive the Kid’s Monster Pack!  To enter, fill out the Rafflecopter form below.  You will notice something new with the Rafflecopter form.  You can either log in with your Facebook account OR enter your name and email (the link to click is just under the Facebook log in).  Once you log in, you will see the mandatory entry/entries.  After completing the mandatory piece, the optional entries will show.  You can complete as many or as few as you’d like.  When you come back each day, the items you’ve already completed will be grayed out and only the ones still available for completion or the daily options will show.  Logging in just allows the Rafflecopter form to be record for you what you’ve already done – so that you don’t see a giveaway two weeks later and say “Did I do that already?” or if you have to leave the page and finish entering later, you can pick up where you left off.