Credit Canada

Help! Call the financial police! My teenager is a shopaholic.

Nearly every penny she gets is invested in one place -- her closet.

How much will a dozen Aeropostale T-shirts, 10 pairs of flip-flops and a fake "designer" handbag be worth in 20 years?

Not much, I fear.

Okay, murky as my memories of my teen years are at this stage, I must admit that investing for the future was not high on my list.

Still, my parents managed to instil some financial common sense, which I started to put to use after I came to the shocking discovery that I didn't know more than them.

Am I doing my daughter the same favour?

"Money doesn't grow on trees," I tell her.

"If you spend the money now, you won't have it later." Blah, blah, blah.

Who can hear all that nagging over the sound of cash registers chiming?

In our instant-gratification society, what kids see and experience every day is a lot of us getting what we want when we want it.

Can't pay right away? Buy it on credit.

Why should teens be any different?

Because the debt chain must be broken, says Laurie Campbell, executive director of Toronto-based Credit Canada, a non-profit agency that last year counselled 60,000 people struggling to improve their finances.

Some of the casualties are shockingly young.

"Young couples, young people just out of school with huge student debt, credit card debt and living at home in their parents' basement. ... It's not a great way to start your life out.

"We really have to get back to the basics and teach people to save for things and to manage better, so they can actually afford to get their own place and they can afford to move on with their life," Campbell says.

Injecting some financial common sense into subjects currently taught in school can surely be done at little cost and without revamping the whole curriculum.

The non-profit Investor Education Fund is taking a leading role, and has a helpful website with some cool tools to help students and parents. It can be found at getsmarteraboutmoney.ca.

We as parents can do our bit by trying to lead by example.

In the end, the best we can do is make sure our children really are smarter than us.

*Material reprinted with the express permission of Canwest News Service.