This is some­thing I got in one of my surfing-with-no-agenda ses­sions, prov­ing to me once again that some­times, just when you think you’re not really look­ing for some­thing in par­tic­u­lar, you end up with some­thing cool. Every time I do this, I am reminded of the orig­i­nal rea­son for this blog—it is really about the cool things you find in this road called life.

The lat­est “con­tro­versy” about the Bei­jing Olympic Games is about the cute lit­tle girl who sang “Ode to the Moth­er­land” dur­ing the Open­ing Cer­e­monies. It turns out she just lip synched for the real singer who was back­stage. Olympic offi­cials made the switch because the seven year old singer had bro­ken teeth! Wow. That’s like Charice Pem­pengco not win­ning in a local singing tilt because her com­pe­ti­tion looks bet­ter than her!

Manli­ness is an ART. More appro­pri­ately, it is a lost art. Con­sider these numbers:

A few weeks ago, my boss talked about his daugh­ters Cody and Nana (who are Grades 5 and 4 I think) and how they have a joint sav­ings account. I was really impressed by how at their young age they’ve learned to save. I was happy to hear that the lost art of sav­ing is not too lost after all.

The prob­lem with our schools is that they don’t teach kids finan­cial man­age­ment. I cer­tainly did not learn about money when I was in Grade School. I learned addi­tion and sub­trac­tion, but that was about it. And yet this is a very impor­tant skill to learn from a young age, some­thing that will lit­er­ally earn div­i­dends later on in life, and assure us that we were able to pre­pare our chil­dren well enough for the future.

Here are some tips on how to teach our kids the lost art of saving…

This week, we will be talk­ing about the actual steps in mak­ing deci­sions. While these are not fool­proof, you are assured of mak­ing an informed deci­sion when you fol­low these steps. Remem­ber, intu­ition comes in all steps of this decision-making process. It is impor­tant to allow your gut feel to guide you as well.