12-year old Brittanie is supposed to be practicing her piano lessons. Instead she’s playing catch with the dog. “Play,” yells her mother, “I’m not paying 50 bucks a week for you to take piano if you’re not going to practice.”
Sometimes parents feel like drill sergeants when their children loaf around instead of concentrating on their skill building, especially when it seems their hard earned money is being thrown away.
Parents today are far more likely to invest in after-school activities for kids than any generation before.
Related: Can You Afford Not To Stay At Home With Your Kids?
A Statistics Canada survey shows that 87% of Canadian kids between the ages of four and fifteen participate in some form of organized activity outside of school. Not only do those activities cost money, they eat up a considerable amount of time. Is it worth it?
Extracurricular activities are good for kids
According to the StatsCan survey, extracurricular activities go hand in hand with good health and higher grades for kids. Younger children who took part in activities were likely to be better at reading and math, and had more advance vocabularies and social skills.
By the teen years, the activities of choice are organized sports, and kids who took part in them were more likely to have friends and keep them than their couch potato contemporaries.
Related: How To Put Your Kids To Work
Teenage sports participants are more likely to stay out of trouble and are less likely to drop out of school. Children learn social skills through sports that help them get along better with their peers – they learn to work as a team and strive for improvement and mastery of a skill.
Activities For Kids: What Are The Costs?
You can spend as much or as little as you like. Community centre activities for kids are usually less expensive than competitive leagues. You can buy second hand instruments and sports equipment – or go whole hog. How much is too much?
You hear stories about parents who not only forked out astronomical amounts of money for coaching and equipment, they actually moved the whole family to a different city so their budding athlete would have access to a world-class coach in pursuit of their professional dreams.
But the fact is, the chances of having a professional career and then benefiting from subsequent lucrative endorsement contracts are pretty slim.
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Even if your child does demonstrate a real knack for their chosen activity, research shows that being involved in a very structured, organized program doesn’t really predict success later on.
Most parents just want their kids to have fun and the more loosely organized teams and instruction usually give them more opportunities to play and learn.
“I hate it! I want to quit!”
My children were into sports and they never missed a game or practice. But what if your child has spent several years in say, music or dance lessons, then doesn’t want to continue? If you’ve already invested considerable time, money and effort in lessons you might not want to let him or her quit.
A friend of mine had a daughter in Irish dance from the time she was three years old. She spent thousands of dollars on instruction, costumes and travel to competitions. When her daughter turned 13, she abruptly decided she no longer wanted to continue.
Another friend hated practicing the violin and her parents let her quit. Now she regrets it and wishes that her parents had made her keep going.
Related: Kids And Money
Perhaps a break is all that’s needed and then your child will go back to the activity. I wouldn’t like it, but I also wouldn’t want to get into a power struggle with my child if he really didn’t want to continue.
Too many structured activities
Some people say that kids should be required to try many different kinds of activities to help them develop interests. Some people impose activities on their children that they would have liked to be involved in when they were young. Maybe your child will enjoy them, but maybe not.
Many parents want to give their children every advantage they possibly can. There are so many enjoyable and enriching opportunities available, from sports, music, languages, the arts, Scouts and Girl Guides, and much more. They would be a useful addition to future job applications and resumes.
But children also need unstructured time to play and develop their own interests and imagination. There’s also the risk of squelching an interest by changing it from play to an organized assignment.
Final Thoughts
In summary, it has been proven that kids benefit from extracurricular activities, learning new skills and making new friends. Just don’t fill up all their non-school time with organized lessons.
And, don’t forget to claim the tax credit worth up to $500 each for the Children’s Fitness Amount and the Children’s Arts Credit for children under the age of 16 enrolled in eligible programs.
Most people only dream about making more money, but in reality it’s easier than you think. You can make more money by getting a raise or a promotion at work, or by changing careers to a more lucrative field. You can also get a second job, or start your own business on the side.
The point is you don’t need to create a real estate empire or inherit a million dollars to start living more comfortably. You just need to get creative and start hustling. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can achieve your financial goals when you start earning more money.
Three years ago, I made a career change that boosted my income by about $10,000. Then we decided my wife would stay home full time with our kids.
We could have cut our budget to the bone and made things work. But instead of spending my free time on the couch watching Seinfeld reruns while our kids were in bed, I decided to start a blog and do some freelance writing on the side to make more money.
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It took some time, but after a few months I started earning a few hundred bucks from advertising and writing. Boomer & Echo is only two years old now, but it’s one of the biggest personal finance blogs in Canada. I’ve also been writing twice a week for Moneyville, an off-shoot of the Toronto Star.
How To Make More Money
A friend of mine has his own landscaping and snow removal business in addition to his full time job. It’s grown so big that he’s had to hire two employees to keep up with demand.
A local entrepreneur started his own DJ business and has been booked solid for weddings and Christmas parties for years. His taste for entrepreneurship didn’t stop there, as he started a Booster Juice franchise a few years ago and just opened up his second location in the mall this past summer.
Related: The Cost Of Starting A Franchise
I found out that quite a few people I work with have their own gigs on the side. Here’s what some of them are doing:
- Photography
- Promotional items (sourcing pens, t-shirts and other promotional items for your business)
- Mortgage broker
- Freelance writing for local magazines and newspapers
- Content creation for local websites
- Bartender
I’ve also met some people who are doing some amazing things online. Steve from My Wife Quit Her Job started an online store selling linens and now teaches people how to open an online store, starting with a free 6 day mini-course.
Peter from Bible Money Matters was designing logos for websites on the side, and so he created a site called Logos for Websites (clever!) and does logos, headers, e-book covers, and Facebook and Twitter backgrounds.
Young & Thrifty bought a house in Vancouver and rented out her basement to help pay the mortgage off faster.
There are a million examples of how to make more money. Cutting your expenses can only go so far. The path to financial freedom becomes much easier when you make more money.
Related: Our Fast Track To Financial Freedom
Having multiple streams of income also helps protect you from financial disaster, in case you lose your main job or become disabled.
So there’s my best financial tip – go out and make more money.
Why We Aren’t In A Post PC World
Apple’s Steve Jobs proclaimed that we are entering the “Post-PC era” back in 2010. This refers to a time when a PC is no longer needed since everything can be done from a tablet connected to the Internet.
Post-PC technologies include tablets, touch screens and cloud computing. Die hard Apple fans might agree with his statement but I just don’t see it. Rather than a Post-PC world, I believe we are in an evolutionary phase of personal computing.
Related: Mobile Banking – Is This The Future?
While tablets and smart phones have been selling like hotcakes in recent years, PC sales have been declining. This must mean that the days of the PC are numbered, right? I don’t think so. We are simply seeing a shift in consumer demand towards more portable devices.
Post-PC World?
To better illustrate this shift, let’s explore what computing devices a family of 2 adults and 3 children would use prior to smart phones and tablets.
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
In this example, a family of 5 may have 5 PCs (2 desktops and 3 laptops) and 4 feature phones. Feature phones are the “old” type of phone that have a simple calendar, address book, etc.
Fast forward to 2012 and the table may look like this:
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
The family now has one less personal computer but has more “smart” devices in the form of a tablet, smart phones and an eReader.
Looking at what else has changed, the biggest difference is that desktops are gone and laptops are in. As laptops have become more powerful and less expensive, they have been adopted by more people. The family has also bought a tablet and an eReader to cater to their changing media needs.
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What about feature phones? Those are all gone, replaced with iOS or Android smart phones.
If we are in a Post-PC world, how come this family still has 4 PCs? There is one big thing to consider.
PC’s are used to create
Tablets, smart phones and eReaders are used to consume. To put this into better perspective:
For the most part, the answer to all of these questions is no. There are certainly people who create things on a tablet (beyond emails) but this is limited.
Since we are going to keep on creating things, PCs will remain a huge part of our lives.
Related: Why Electronic Banking Is Safe
PCs have a couple of huge advantages over tablets and smart phones because their screens are bigger, they have more processing power and they are designed to sit on something like a desk!
Tablets and smart phones are great for socializing, corresponding, finding directions and keeping organized but they are not good for working.
Touch will only take you so far
Another big factor that Apple first sold us on, and others followed suit with, is the benefits of touch. We are all tapping and sliding these days on our new devices.
Steve Jobs was looking to do away with the mouse for a long time. Touch has been revolutionary but it alone will not bring about the Post-PC world. Touch is imprecise.
Touch is a technology that is geared to consuming, not creating. As soon as you need to draw or write something that requires precision, touch goes out the window.
Cloud Computing
Technology companies have been investing heavily in cloud computing in recent years. This technology is another player in the Post-PC world which aims to store all of our data somewhere out on the Internet and provide us with internet hosted applications.
This technology moves your data and applications onto internet accessible systems run by companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and others.
Cloud technology is another great step forward, but it also won’t result in a PC-less era. We’ll still need to interact with our content, we just might store less of it on our own devices.
Related: Dividend Paying Technology Stocks – How Are They Doing?
So what is the future of personal computing?
Since I don’t think we’re in a Post-PC world, what comes next?
It’s my belief that the next step in the PC evolution is the touch enabled Ultrabook. This class of PC has a keyboard, mouse and touch capability. They are lighter than a laptop, have longer battery life and employ solid state hard drives (SSD) to reduce boot up time.
Ultrabooks are trying to duplicate the success Apple has had with their MacBook Air product. The difference is Ultrabooks will appeal to a much wider audience since more people use Windows PCs than Mac, their price points are also lower.
Where tablets, smart phones and eReaders have been revolutionary for consuming content and media, Ultrabooks are the next step in personal computing. Microsoft’s surface tablet is another step forward since it offers touch, pen and keyboard interface.
The PC is not dead and won’t be for a very long time.
Andrew Martin is a personal finance and investing blogger from Toronto, Ontario with a background in technology and a passion for travel. His blog, She Thinks I’m Cheap aims to help Canadians make more money by sharing facts, stories and advice.