Christmas Eve is upon us. We all know the time of year. A time for family gatherings and a time to share gifts with the people that we love and cherish. Every year, I have been a part of gift exchanges and purchased gifts for nieces and nephews, but this is my first year purchasing and feeling the pressure of Christmas morning for our very own daughter.

As many of you may know, my wife and I have two children. Our oldest daughter is almost 23 months old and our youngest is 3 months old. It is a lot of fun interacting with our children on a daily basis. I detailed the joys of spending time with my family in my post: We are on a Mini-Retirement Trial. Being a teacher, I get a lot of time off in the summer. It just so happens that the birth of our second child happened while I was already off of work. This allowed me to be home for four weeks, before heading back to work. In August, I dove back into teaching and my wife stayed home with the kids.

In the future, we plan on sending our daughter to college. And like most parents, we worry about the cost of college and how we will pay for it. Well some stats on college tuition found my inbox and I thought that the information in the article was so important that I had to write an article about the rising tuition costs.

This past November, my wife and I were lucky enough to welcome a little daughter into our family. She is a joy to our family and we have loved getting to watch her grow up, and love getting to see her personality develop every day.

A shoe game is a game played by students (maybe even some adults) in schools. I don't know the age range of the participants, but the students in 7th and 8th grade at my school worry about their 'shoe game.' A shoe game is a comparison between the amount and type of shoes owned. This is a big deal to my students in middle school, because having a bunch of different shoes and really nice shoes is a status symbol. This could possibly be from the fact that my school has a dress code for shirts, jackets and pants, but no dress code on shoes. 

As a husband and soon-to-be-father, I worry about certain things. I worry about reaching the financial summit, so my wife and I can be financially secure. I worry about a safe delivery for my wife and my future child. I worry about whether they would be okay, when I am gone (And by this I mean financially). I know that losing a loved-one is very difficult, but with money problems it can become even more difficult. I don't want my wife to have to worry about money, if I happen to die early. 

The other day, I was messing around on the internet reading financial articles and I stumbled across a thing called The Texas Tuition Promise Fund. I was intrigued to see what was being offered and decided to do some more research. Texas and other states have college pre-payment programs that can be used by your kids in college. 

As a soon-to-be father, I have been interested in the importance of parental guidance and I have even written a couple articles about this topic. Since, we can't count on the schools to teach our children how to handle money, then we have to be the ones to teach them. Therefore, I am writing this article to put down strategies that I want to use to teach my children about finances. I hope that you can find these strategies beneficial, and you will try to use them with your children.

As many of you know, I am a big fan of both Dave Ramsey and Mr. Money Mustache (MMM).  Both guys have a method and that method has worked for them.  Dave believes in budgets and MMM does not.  Dave uses the budget to tell him that he can spend money and MMM just avoids spending at all cost.  These two methods of finance are where I find myself.  I feel like I kind of blend between Dave and MMM.  I sometimes spend money because I have it, but sometimes I just won't spend any money.  There's a happy medium to be found in between Dave and MMM.  The same can be said for their beliefs on when to have a baby.

In an earlier article, I talked about how important it is for parents to teach their children about money and to do this by guiding children with your actions.  That of course is not the only way to teach your children how to handle money.  Of course, my grandmother pointed out some of the stuff that I left out of the article in the comment section and I felt like I needed to address this comment, because she is right.  So, let's look at what my grandmother commented after my first parental guidance article.

I find it interesting that I am writing this article, even though I am not a father yet.  I have been studying this subject and found a comment made recently by Dave Ramsey on the Dave Ramsey show very interesting.  He hosts a conference called the "Smart Conference."  This conference is made up of lots of motivational speakers.  He was reviewing some of the meatier pieces of the conference and he talked about something that Meg Meeker said on the stage.