Today's guest is Chuck Jaffe, author and host of the Money Life podcast. Chuck shares his Halloween project, meant to help kids learn about money and risk, and maybe eat less candy. Chuck and Dawn also cover how to give your kids an allowance. Information about Chuck Jaffe: Chuck Jaffe is a veteran financial journalist and nationally syndicated financial columnist whose work appears in newspapers from coast to coast. Over the course of his career, he has won numerous awards for business and personal finance journalism. Chuck is the author of three books: “Getting Started In Finding a Financial Advisor,” “The Right Way to Hire Financial Help,” and “Chuck Jaffe’s Lifetime Guide to Mutual Funds.” Listen to the Money Life podcast here. Show transcript: 00:00:02 Hey there. I'm Dawn Starks, author of Simplify Your Financial Life and your host for the SimpleMoney Podcast, where we make personal finance simple. Welcome. This is Episode 151. Today's interview is with Chuck Jaffe. Chuck Jaffe is the host of the Money Life Podcast. He's a veteran financial journalist and a nationally syndicated financial columnist whose work appears in newspapers from coast to coast. 00:00:26 Over the course of his career, he has won numerous awards for business and personal finance journalism. Chuck is the author of three books on the topics of mutual funds and how to find a financial advisor. Today we're talking about teaching kids about money. I hope you enjoy my interview with Chuck Jaffe. 00:00:41 DS: Chuck Jaffe, welcome to the SimpleMoney Podcast. 00:00:45 CJ: Thanks so much for having me. 00:00:47 DS: So since it's October and we're coming up here to Halloween, there's something that you and I talked about the last time we were on the phone together. And I was so intrigued by it that I thought it would make a fun topic for the podcast. So I wanted you to tell my listeners about your Halloween scheme. What do you do for trick-or-treaters? And I recognize that, with COVID that this could potentially be a different year, 00:01:10 but this is such a great idea. 00:01:11 CJ: Well, for starters, we'll get to what is going to happen this year, because COVID is not holding me down. I have done the right things, including contacting the CDC, to make sure that I can do what I do this year. But I don't do trick or treat, I basically do trade or treat. 00:01:34 It's a different choice at my house, and the choice is cash or candy. And every year I change the drill, and I've now been doing this for five years, and I've changed it and made it more complicated and what have you. But there are also people in my audience who have done this as well, and you can make it simple, 00:02:00 you can do a lot of different things with it, but using this as a way to teach kids choices about money, there are so many things that you can do, that, whether it's what I'm doing, where it is literally kids making a choice that involves what kind of decisions are you going to make, and how do you value candy versus cash and more, 00:02:20 or it can be things that the National Council for Financial Educators, who had a cash-for-candy thing - in their case, it was really what do you do with the extra candy? Because I don't know about where you live, but in my neighborhood, when my kids were young enough to trick or treat, they always brought home way more candy than any child needed. 00:02:41 DS: That's true. And actually, just as an aside here, there's a, where we live it's very rural and hilly. And so kids would have to be pretty hardcore, Rambo-types to get up our driveways. So we usually go to the neighboring towns, there's a neighborhood that's flat. And I heard that so many kids go there to trick or treat, that 00:02:59 that the town accepts donations throughout the fall, in order to help the homeowners buy enough candy for all those trick-or-treaters. And those kids com
