How to Teach Kids the Basics of Business and Investing Early (2025)

Children are naturally curious and creative. When guided, these traits can help them become thoughtful early-stage investors and entrepreneurs. Teaching kids basic business and investing skills isn’t about pushing them toward a specific career—it’s about helping them understand money, weigh pros and cons, and turn intentional ideas into action.

This guide offers parents age-appropriate, experience-based activities to teach financial concepts, including income, costs, profit, investment, and ethical decision-making.

Using Beem’s Everdraft™, an accessible adult tool, we demonstrate how responsible short-term choices mirror smart decisions in children’s projects: staying focused on long-term goals, seeking help only when needed, and planning for repayment.

Why Early Business and Investing Education Matters

Thinking ahead of the game supports not only your finances but also teaches future planning, problem-solving, and accountability.

Youngsters who participate in start-up experiments have an understanding of the necessity of tenacity, learning from failures, and hard work in achieving their objectives. Learning good money management helps them become more self-assured as adults.

With a craft fair or lemonade business, learning about income, expenses, and profit is much simpler than with a worksheet. By incorporating reflection, you can establish a foundation that lasts a lifetime.

Step 1 — Introduce Basic Business Concepts

First are the four fundamental concepts: earnings, expenses, profit, and loss of income.

Provide real-life examples so people understand.

Lemonade assumed the cost from the customer’s point of view, which is the amount they pay for a cup of lemonade.
Costs include items such as sugar, lemons, and glasses.
Your profit is what’s left over after subtracting all of your expenses from your income.

A loss occurs when costs exceed income.

For a fun activity, try lemonade. Help them determine the selling cup price. Track how many cups you sell and subtract the cost of supplies. Once you have calculated a profit (2 per cup), ask kids, “What can we do differently next time to make more profit?” Should we focus on increasing sales, improving quality, or reducing prices?

Step 2 — Teach the Value of Investment Early

Something early on is a wager that it will eventually pay off. Providing kids with more expensive craft supplies or encouraging them to set aside a portion of their earnings to buy a better table for their future could be one of the easiest ways to help them.

Please provide comparable examples:

If you spent $5 on better markers, you could generate $3 greeting cards rather than $1.
Additional cash is placed aside to form the “business fund” for the next season.

To put it another way, Everdraft™ is comparable to a scheduled resource that adults use sometimes, but for older kids. If an adult expects to receive their paycheck soon, they can utilise Everdraft™ to cover an unforeseen need, but only if they plan to pay back the loan.

Even the most diligent efforts and enterprises may need help from time to time. Teach youth that it is wise to borrow or spend money up front only if the repayment is well considered.

Step 3 — Encourage Entrepreneurial Thinking

To be an entrepreneur is to think of a problem and consider how you might approach or solve it. “What around you is irritating – in your community?” (the kids say) What are some things to make life better? Then consider what products and/or services may be extremely helpful in resolving those problems.

Activities to stimulate thinking are:

As part of the problem-solving context, have the students draft a list of five annoyances they experienced over the week.
Choose a product that you would be presenting to a potential customer, and come up with your reasons why you would refer to this product as a “hot product”.?

You must continually challenge yourself with creative thinking processes, and regardless of the outcome, you are deriving value from the exercise. Ask students to create low-cost prototypes and test these prototypes with actual “users.”

Step 4 — Introduce Risk and Reward Concepts

Every business has some degree of risk. Instead of discouraging children from taking risks, we should prepare them when they do take risks.

Use examples to make your points more straightforward:

It’s dangerous to create 20 cookies for sale when you might only sell five.
Benefit: If 20 cookies sell, your profits will rise; otherwise, you will lose money on the remaining cookies.

I’ll demonstrate ways to lessen the damage:

To start, make a small batch of cookies.
Distribute samples and conduct market research.
Sell cookies and lemonade to maximise your earnings.

Weigh the possible gain against the potential loss to consider risk as a controllable aspect of decision-making.

Step 5 — Teach Simple Financial Tracking

Keeping records doesn’t have to be a complex undertaking. Keeping records doesn’t have to be a complex undertaking. – Use fun games, ledgers, and small real-world businesses that relate to course design to engage students.

Actions to take: Keep a record of everything you do. Keep track of the money coming in and going out after every sale. After a day or a week, add up all the costs and talk about where most of them went. How do we make them smaller?

This activity will teach you how to be economical and how small things can add up to large sums of money.

Step 6 — Introduce Goal-Oriented Saving and Investing

Create quantifiable goals and link your earnings to them. By splitting your money into categories for consumption, saving, and reinvestment, you can develop the skill of setting priorities.

A suggested summary for beginners:

Reinvest 50% of your money back into the business,
35% set aside funds for a more significant purchase,
20% is used or donated by contributors.

Choose a new baking sheet, for example. Keep an eye on the situation. Children understand why many organisations choose to reinvest their profits rather than spend them immediately after witnessing how reinvestment increases capacity and revenue.

Step 7 — Gamify Business and Investment Lessons

Playing entertaining games is a fantastic method to help you remember information. In a classroom simulation, have students participate in several rounds of stock market modeling, starting a business, or making investments.

A game could be an example: Provide students with fictitious portfolios and have them choose between “risky” investments (with a chance of significant returns or monetary losses) and more conservative investments (with more certain but smaller, consistent returns). After a few rounds, discuss products and how you felt about them.

Producing money has costs and rewards, as the games show, and it’s usually advisable to consider the broader picture rather than acting hastily.

Step 8 — Encourage Reflection and Iteration

Think back on the things you did after the game or project. Examine:

What, then, worked?
What did not work?
Would you make any changes?

You can use reflective practice in your experience. One of the best ways for kids to engage in reflective practice is to request that they complete a “post-mortem”. This could be a paragraph or a doodle to summarise what happened and the learning that took place. This builds a rhythmic routine: try, measure, modify, try again.

Step 9 — Teach Ethical and Responsible Business Practices

Values are important. Consider the honest advertising context, including fair pricing and treating customers fairly and respectfully. Consider thinking about the factors:

What do you do when a customer has a problem with your products?
Does it matter that I charge more than I should – no one is looking?

Improve your problem-solving and service skills by providing student feedback via role-playing. The best part of the business world is that trust can only be built when you do the right thing.

Step 10 — Model Adult Behaviour

When it comes to children, the best way to learn about the kids is to watch them in action!

Allow them to observe your problem-solving, investing, and budgeting skills. Offer an explanation of your adult logic as reasonable and appropriate in the moment when you stop a subscription, or save for a sizable purchase, for them to understand you and themselves better.

For instance, you might use Everdraft™ to show that adults always have a plan in place to pay back short-term loans. This is because these loans are sometimes used for scheduled purposes by adults.

Learning how to avoid debt through self-control and planning is one of the most crucial things you can learn about personal and business finance.

Conclusion

The following critical thinking skills — curiosity, planning, risk awareness, record-keeping, and ethics — are more important to teach children about business and investing than any definitions or formulas.

Praise small victories, start small, and view failures as an opportunity to learn, not stop. Engage students with simple games, ledgers, and real-world small businesses that relate to course design.

By showing adults that they can responsibly borrow from resources like Everdraft™ to meet unforeseen needs, you can help them better understand borrowing. Beem helps you underline that sound financial management is all about planning rather than rushing at the last minute. Download the app now!

FAQs on How to Teach Kids the Basics of Business and Investing Early

At what age should children learn the basics of business and investing?

Tweens and teens can start to deal with more complex investment concepts, as 7 to 10 years is generally considered the appropriate age for simple projects.

How can parents make learning a fun and engaging experience?

To engage youths with the learning process and make it relevant, include games, tangible projects, feedback from real customers, and simulated marketplaces.

How does Beem’s Everdraft™ relate to teaching investing?

Start with a little sum of actual or fictitious money. As you gain more responsibilities, gradually move to utilising real money.

Should kids use real money for learning business and investing?

After a project is completed, discuss the problems that arose, encourage participants to reflect on their actions, and emphasise that trying again is preferable to blaming others.

How can parents encourage kids to learn from mistakes?

Use Everdraft™to obtain the funds you need quickly. It’s similar to taking out a company loan, but you can do it responsibly if you have a solid plan for repaying it and a compelling reason to do so. Children learn that responsibility and flexibility go hand in hand. Starting small, keeping interest, and using the following weekend as a mini-market day are the most significant ways to become a business owner.

How to Teach Kids the Basics of Business and Investing Early

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