How to help my teen manage a small amount of money when I have no savings
Long story short:
My daughter is 15 and when she turns 18 she will receive 15k from a car accident settlement from when she was 5. She has a 4 inch scar across her forehead that has healed beautifully. I was diagnosed epileptic that day when our car met a telephone pole.
Unfortunately for her, I was not taught financial literacy. I am 37 with $4000 savings to my name, maybe $3000 in retirement. In some ways I thought I was a pretty good mom. But I’m absolutely a bottom of the barrel parent when it came to facing what was, to me, the unbearably overwhelming world of managing money and I just kept living paycheck to paycheck. So we live in an apartment. And I have no means for vacation. And she has the least of her friends.
So my question is this: how do I do my damndest to make sure she never ends up this way? When she gets her money she’ll have no example of how to manage it. How to grow it. This is not like I’ve saved this money for her. This is all hers from a trust. I have no say. I want her to know an adult life completely different from mine. Where she can experience things and secure her future and leave her childhood life behind. I never succeeded in cutting the ties of the poverty identity of my parents. I never thought I would be more than the poor kid and so in turn, kept myself poor. I want that left in the past for her. I just don’t know how to teach her to transform her life and be responsible with growing her money.