In this sixth lesson in the Smart Consumer Skills Guide for Brilliant Kids series we ask you to explore debt and how good you really are with debt. In the last lesson, we gave 5 questions to ask yourself when spending. Debt is extremely important to understand and master. It can help in providing you with a great lifestyle, or can end up being a chain around your leg. It can ruin the rest of your life if a healthy respect is not given to it – it is a double edged sword, which unfortunately most of us do not understand.Debt is something that you will come into contact with sooner or later – the truth is that you need debt to live today – it is a fact of life and you need to be able to deal with it. The world economy functions when money is moving around it. Stop or disrupt that flow and people’s lives are affected by changing prices, changing interest rates, changing availability of goods and services. Debt is used to help money flow around more freely and quickly. It is readily available to all.

At MyBrilliantKidz, we believe that all our children are Brilliant Kids in the making – it is up to us parents to bring this out. Whilst we may think about this as primarily being linked with education, we should not forget the “real world” skills and attributes that are needed to get the best out of adulthood.

Unfortunately these are not taught at schools, leaving our kids to pick them up in later life or at best copy our habits. We are all swayed by the powerful media and advertising companies to buy and behave in particular ways.

Very few parents take the time to ‘educate’ their children in these skills. Not only can kids be smart and savvy in developing those important financial skills, they also lay the foundation stones for taking the first steps to entrepreneurial mindset.

Your body is made of 2 halves – the head and the rest of your body. The rest of your body has the ability to earn in the $20 – $100 per hour region. Your head or mind has the ability to earn $ millions. To awaken this potential, an entrepreneurial mindset is required. The younger a child starts the easier and more natural this becomes.

There are a number of tools and games that will help do this, which we will talk about in later articles. The first set of articles in this series will talk about how to become a financially aware consumer.

Companies spend over $300 billion a year on marketing, advertising and teaching their staff to sell! Why such a high figure? The answer is that we as consumers, spend over $7 Trillion a year!

The result is that everywhere we are bombarded and tempted to buy spend our hard earned cash. From the billboards, TV to the supermarket, we constantly encounter many imaginative and varied ways and techniques to get us to spend.

Companies also spend millions to train their staff to buy when they are buying for the company as procurement officers. Yet as consumers – we are the buyers who do not get any “buyers’ training”. Yes there are consumers groups, but these are small and cannot compete with the big budgets of the multi-nationals.

That’s why we at MyBrilliantKidz have started this practical survival guide to living in the most competitive consumer economies in the world.

www.MyBrilliantKidz.com