…on our Service. Automatically from You. For example, through cookies We or our Service Providers set on Your Device as You navigate through our Service. From Service Providers. For example,…
Terms of Use
…or “us” or “Gifting Sense”) through the GiftingSense.com (“Website”), and all content, services, and products available at or through the Website. These Terms of Use are very important and explain…
Three Canadian Winners at the 2023 “FinLit Oscars”
…was the 2023 Runner-Up for the SKBI Prize for Sustainable Finance Literacy because thinking before buying is the easiest way to help protect the planet. When we only purchase, or…
Frequently Asked Questions
…do with the little money that comes their way. And financial knowledge needs to be relevant to be helpful. Early financial education solves so much! When children get comfortable with…
Stuff Kids Want: Sports Equipment
…Basketball, Football, Baseball, Softball, Lacrosse, Ultimate Frisbee, Cheerleading, Modern Dance, Downhill Skiing, Cross-Country Running, Ice Hockey, Archery, Squash, Badminton, or, wait for it, Quidditch! Study after study illustrate the benefits…
Teacher Tab
…a brilliant tool for setting the foundation for kids to become money-smart adults!” KELLEY KEEHN, BEST-SELLING AUTHOR OF RICH GIRL, BROKE GIRL Gifting Sense facilitated a free workshop for women…
We’re An Atomic Habit!
…Which is why we find his work so exciting. We’ve built a free, safe, and easily repeatable system that families can use to change their spending behaviour for the better!…
Spend Wisely in September For a Better December
As Labour Day and “back-to-school” approach, so too do battle cries for school supplies, new clothes and sports equipment. The average family reportedly spends over $600 getting ready for school….
Stuff Kids Want: Cell Phones
…completes a Gift Survey asking for a new phone, they will be reminded to research warranty offerings in Question 9. Finally, don’t forget that completed Gift Surveys can also be…
Happy Holidays Raj Chetty
…we are interpreting the study’s findings as a call to arms if you will, for the top third of income earners in Canada and the United States, to whenever possible,…
Four Words That Teach Financial Literacy
…a potential purchase, before you make it. Visit gsdevibd.wpengine.com and click on “DIMS SCORE® Calculator” to try one today. They are free, safe and smart. Download the Glossary DIMS SCORE®…
Cookies Policy
…singular or in plural. Definitions For the purposes of this Cookies Policy: Company (referred to as either “the Company”, “We”, “Us” or “Our” in this Cookies Policy) refers to Gifting…
Home
…forward. HEBREW PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOLS FOR GLOBAL CITIZENS Gifting Sense presented to a group of freshmen here at Quest Forward Academy. The content was extremely relevant and our students were…
A “LOADED” Case for Early Financial Education
…at once – for free! Pretty powerful, huh? Dr. Newcomb understands where our money personalities come from. Her research explores why certain childhood experiences lead to later-in-life apprehensions about money….
Who Are We
…on their own going forward. HEBREW PUBLIC CHARTER SCHOOLS FOR GLOBAL CITIZENS Gifting Sense presented to a group of freshmen here at Quest Forward Academy. The content was extremely relevant…
Four Fridays of Fun-damental Financial Literacy
…can be mildly problematic for younger children, or with older computers, so getting your first try out of the way sets the path for Week Two. 5) Distribute the Gifting…
Remember Shopping From Home At Midnight?
…more effort to spend. Things like waiting for payday, waiting for a store to open, or waiting for a store to have stock, gave consumers time to think about what…
Answering Chicago’s “Questions to Pose”
…delivered in schools or community centres, but also recently through Outschool, where we have been able to work with home-schooled learners. Have the materials been found to be objective? Yes….
No One Has Carte Blanche!
…There are entire fields of study about this very dynamic, (Yale’s extremely popular course examining some of them is available right now on Coursera for free) but let us summarize…
The Theme Park Pass Dilemma
…spend $330.00 (when we calculate an additional $30 of cost per weekly visit throughout the 8-week summer) and not just $90.00 when they ask for a park season pass. Summer…
Allowance Best Practices for Teens
…anticipate for the coming year under each category. Decide what percentage you are comfortable funding, and establish a disbursement schedule for equal amounts of allowance at intervals throughout the year….
How is a Penny Saved, a Penny Earned?
…and spent $70 for the entire outing, explain how during the pandemic you have now “saved” $140 – which can pay for one heck of a streaming account for the…
“How About YOU Buy the Groceries This Week!”
The pandemic has thrown families everywhere a real curveball to say the least. But social distancing doesn’t only present challenges. For example, a primary benefit of all the extra together-time,…
Being the Broccoli of Lifestyle Lessons
…very methodical way for the last five years by helping them calculate the DIMS® (Does It Make Sense?) Score for a potential purchase or request – before they make it…
Bruce Sellery Knew This Was Coming
…For example, we love the comparison of your current financial situation to the “Point A” required for Google maps to give you directions to “Point B”. The app literally needs…
What Do Favourite & Disappointing Holiday Gifts Have in Common?
…Them Credit For Believe it or not, kids have a pretty good feel for their family’s financial situation. Every February they use the DIMS SCORE® Calculator for Super Bowl tickets…
Replace “Resting Gift Face” with “Grateful Happy Face”
Most of us yearn for the sublime second stanza of John Lennon’s “So This is Christmas” when we prepare for the holidays, in that we merely hope to come together…
Stuff Kids Want: Clothes
…interest or style-specific that no one else wants them. If your family is in the habit of completing Gift Surveys before making material (pardon the pun) purchases – you already…
Virtual Café
…your kids calculate the DIMS (Does It Make Sense?) Score for an outing at gsdevibd.wpengine.com Check out A-Rod’s eye-opening CNBC Mini-Series: “Back in the Game” where he helps rehabilitate former…
Who Knew? TBB is Curriculum Compliant!
…free – two things thought to be mutually exclusive. Then physically visiting schools became almost impossible which inadvertently paved the way for increased comfort with digital platforms – and in…
Allowance Best Practices For Kids 12 & Under
…methods for teens immediately after Spring Break. When younger children receive allowance, a frequently used rule of thumb for the amount is some multiple of their age over a given…
The Real Cost of Scarcity
…impact of constantly living with less. Anyone familiar with Operation Hope out of Atlanta could be forgiven for seeing this book as a pretty reasonable explanation for exactly why kids…
Gift Card Management: Holiday Hack #10
…lots of options. Gift cards can be sold (at a discount) for cash or even aggregated at places like cardpool.com. Amazon.com allows you to exchange Visa, MasterCard or Amex gift…
How It Works
…– or when appropriate, graciously ask for a birthday or holiday (or back-to-school or graduation…) gift, that might make sense. It only takes about three minutes for kids to get…
Who Wears a Coat 300 Times?
…for holiday and birthday gifts into a tool that parents can use to teach their kids to think before they buy. In about two minutes, children complete some quick calculations…
Prevent This: Back-to-School Buyer’s Remorse
This post was originally published in 2016 as part of our “Prevent This” series, which is why it contains images of children not socially distancing. The interesting thing for us…
Where’s the Off Button?
…can be just as enjoyable in the comfort of your own family room. Give your kids a movie budget for the week and the freedom to spend it as they…
Why Crowd-Funding For A Child’s Gift Can Make Sense
…their wishes come true? Well for starters you can ask them to complete our Gift Survey(s) when considering a wish-list item or purchase. At Gifting Sense our mission is to…
Easy Eggs for a Crowd: Holiday Hack #5
…entry is a super easy way for your kids to help feed the unusually large crowds you can have on hand for breakfast over the holidays. Kids aged 6 and…
Instructions for Toothpaste?
…different for every age and stage of childhood. Allowance best practices are quite different for kids 12 and under, versus those for Teens. Younger children tend to ask for a…
The Only Thing That Teaches Kids About Money
…our children become completely uninterested in a purchase once it is for their own account? They “worked hard” for their money and tend to spend it with a lot more…
Surprise – Parents are Using Gift Surveys for Themselves!
…Forwarding a completed Gift Survey is indeed a gracious way to let your spouse know what you would really like and appreciate for an upcoming holiday or birthday gift. Yes,…
What’s the Difference Between Needs and Wants?
The pandemic has thrown families everywhere a real curveball to say the least. But social distancing doesn’t only present challenges. For example, a primary benefit of all the extra together-time,…
The Best Things in Life?
The pandemic has thrown families everywhere a real curveball to say the least. But social distancing doesn’t only present challenges. For example, a primary benefit of all the extra together-time,…
A “Wow” Answer To Why We Need Early Financial Education
…cards not as accessible. My early adulthood personal finance mistakes included: Running up a big long-distance phone bill before Telecom was deregulated. Not shopping around for the very best car…
Should We Use A Different Acronym?
…more in common than not, it just sometimes takes more effort than we enjoy to uncover. But the reward for that effort can be a path forward, and isn’t that…
This Summer, Meet Dr. Moira Somers
…serve for dessert, your mental energy pie doesn’t get bigger just because “more people are coming for dinner”. Which is why stressful times are so stressful – you can’t help…
DIMS – Does It Make Sense?® Scores Help Kids Develop Good Financial Defence
…example, by asking for an experience that will help a child acquire a skill (e.g. Music Camp); by asking for an item that comes from a local store (which reduces…
Turn Loyalty Points Into Travel Gifts: Holiday Hack #12
…hack describes how you can either ask for or give the gift of travel, for next to nothing: loyalty program reward points to the rescue! Do you travel often for…
Where Does Money Really Come From?
…“Where does money come from?” dinner, is just to make sure that your younger children know for a fact, that spending is paid for by your hard work – not…
Can Any 17-Year-Old Canadian Become A Millionaire?
…become a millionaire in their lifetime if they consistently commit to a series of small but important decisions from the end of high school forward. When you read his book,…
Don’t Be A Sales Tax Fairy (STF)
…the screen where you pay, Sam noticed that he now needed $59.38 for a $39.99 skateboard. What was happening he wanted to know? This was before free shipping had become…
I’m Returning this Jacket – for Spite!
One of our favorite Seinfeld episodes ever was when Jerry returned a jacket to a clothing store “for spite”! When the saleswoman stated that “spite” wasn’t an acceptable condition for…
Don’t Get Burned by Giving Allowance Without Structure
…not live on farms where there is an abundance of work to be regularly completed; even jobs outside the family home for older school-aged children are harder to come by…
Leading By Financial Example
…consciously elect not to live as their parents did, because they have experienced or seen the consequences of for example, living in excessive debt, but most of the time, “The…
Careful Spending Doesn’t Have to be Bad-Tasting Medicine
What do Henry David Thoreau and Marie Kondo have in common? Thoreau is perhaps most well known for authoring Walden (A Life in the Woods). You could describe his 1854…
What We Have Learned Delivering Workshops
…gift they’ve received that perhaps wasn’t quite what they were hoping for. Who among us hasn’t experienced some form of buyer’s remorse? 4) Once the cost per use of an…
Summer Reading To The Rescue
…actually free, and drips with benefit: reading. Summer break reading ability loss is a real and documented phenomena for younger school-aged children, which is why summer reading is so widely…
Two Gifts for the Price of One
…some fundamental money smarts, for free. As we head into Holiday 2017, we’re looking forward to helping more families than ever teach their kids to think before, they ask to…
Jobs Parents Had in High School
…enough to help figure out how to pay for it. Working during the school year was a much more common occurrence in prior generations. And summer jobs used to be…
Get Her “Rich Girl, Broke Girl” Instead
…effective plan for the future. But interestingly enough, we found the section in this book on the tremendous importance of understanding the ramifications of common-law co-habitation perhaps the most compelling….
A Big Free FinLit Lab?
…blah” moment and told you about it – but they knew the power of living through the reaction would be far more engaging and effective. Same thing for learning about…
Can Kids Be Mini-Inflation-Fighting Superheroes?
…of how much you can afford. Because we see children stop themselves from asking for gifts that might not make sense for their family all the time. Our free and…
Why Isn’t Your Wish-List Item a Good Idea?
…purchases are truly age-appropriate and aligned with your values. For example, if you don’t like broccoli, or classical music, why buy a t-shirt that has anything to do with either…
Develop Money Privilege Empathy With Your Teens
…allow your family to exit the pandemic with money-smarter kids. You don’t need to be an expert or download an App. You only have to take some of the time…
Your Family’s Pandemic Survival Plan
…might take for them to do the same one day. How can that be bad? Hang onto hope everyone. Lets get through this – if nothing else – with money-smarter…
Why We Love the Work of Dr. Randy Pausch
…a win-win! But don’t just take our word for it, “DIMS SCORE® Calculator” with one of our Gift Surveys today and see for yourself if shopping doesn’t become the best…
A Future with Fewer Princesses
…really the best gift you can give them. Safe, free, quick, and available wherever you have your smartphone (on gsdevibd.wpengine.com), our Gift Surveys ask kids all the questions that should…
Why Does Adding Cost Reduce My DIMS SCORE?
…you through the journey of thinking that lead to each one of the questions you see in our Gift Surveys today. This post discusses why things like the need for…
The Nest…Egg
…a nest egg is a sum of money, typically saved over a long period of time, destined for a future meaningful purchase, for example a home. As the jury is…
A Free Gift Kids Can Give Their Moms: Holiday Hack #2
…gift, for free! As 11-14 year olds are the largest cohort of new smartphone owners, they are likely to be enthusiastic about this project. If you are wondering about best…
Give Your Kids MAGiC for the Holidays this Year
…the peace of mind that comes from having “Money And Gift Competence”. Gift giving is such a big part of life in so many countries around the world that learning…
Gifting Sense Is On Outschool!
…work with your schedule.) As Outschool has to be compensated for use of their safe and secure Zoom platform, and demand for workshops keeps growing, there is a fee for…
For Best Results: Try Baking-In Simple Effective Limits!
…Read the last Chapter of The Behaviour Gap (“Simple. Not Easy.”), to better understand why we often choose complicated over simple solutions. At Gifting Sense we turn shopping for birthday…
How Careful Spending Helps Kids “Find Their Whistle”
If you are looking for a fun but authentic read to give as a Father’s Day or Graduation Gift this coming June, we’ve got good news for you: We were…
We Love This Woman’s Work
…end of it. She even encourages employers to provide time in the benefits calendar for such a day. Try implementing a “frequency budget” versus a dollar amount budget for expenses…
Why Doesn’t Total Cost Impact DIMS SCOREs?
…for a new dress, or a new case for a new electronic device. The pdf summaries, which are automatically generated when children complete a Gift Survey, illustrate all the math…
Born Before the Smartphone?
…ComicCon – the massive annual convention for admirers of comic books, their production and characters.) We attended the Tech Up For Women conference last year and were duly impressed with…
Holiday Weekends Are a Great Time to Teach Kids About Money
…weekends are a terrific time to talk to your kids about spending in particular. Because holidays like Canada Day and July 4th come with open invitations for families to spend…
Stuff Kids Want: Summer Camp
…Summer Camp can be a burden for families, despite the compelling benefits, as outlined in this Psychology Today article. Sheepish about forwarding completed Gift Surveys to your extended family members…
Prevent This: Not Benefiting From 100 Years’ Experience
…crowd-funding tool, for wish-list items too expensive for one person to pay for. They can be printed off, e-mailed, or shared via social media.) By doing so, you’ll be ensuring…
Prevent This: Not Seeing Yourself in the Mirror
…for so many kids, this time of year is just all about gearing up for school…and experienced parents know the items that will get worn and used the most are…
Should Grad Traditions Be Honoured At Any Cost?
…But you can at least ask them to complete a Gift Survey for the outfit or night they are dreaming of and use the automatically generated pdf summary to have…
Learn How the Holidays Can Be D.O.W.N. with Sustainability
…developed a three-part strategy for achieving a “greener Google”: 1. Design out waste. 2. Keep products and materials in use as long as possible. 3. While continuing to transition to…
The Missing (Financial) Link
…peace of mind, are available for readers who adopt even half of the good habits Fred describes. Mr. Selinger opens with the fact that “We are living in…a complex world…
What d’cha Get?
…that lay outside of your budget, were you able to suggest alternative ways they might be able to get what they really wanted? For example, by politely and thoughtfully asking…
Gift Survey
…and/or guardians to let them know what you might like to receive for an upcoming birthday or holiday gift. They will love that you really thought about how much you…
More Ways Than Ever to Get It Wrong?
…than we ever anticipated. We missed the excitement of adding new original things for our followers to read, but were comforted by how universal and lasting all of prior posts…
All Sorts of Families Face Gifting Challenges
…each month etiquette expert Catherine Newman offers her best advice on all sorts of social quandaries. Almost without fail, there is a question regarding gifting – for example the one…
Plant an Acorn and Grow a Mighty Oak
…a big part of the inspiration behind Gifting Sense – our new little company that turns shopping for holiday and birthday gifts into a tool for parents to teach their…
Get A Gift, Give A Gift: Holiday Hack #7
…entry is a “head-fake”; an indirect learning opportunity for your children to be reminded of how fortunate they are, even when they are already “thinking of others”. Kids are often…
The Only Problem With Summer Jobs
…is for discretionary spending, now and in the coming school year. Allowing kids to make purchases, some good and some not-so-good, is certainly one way to learn how to think…
Put A Cape On Ms. Taub!
…is to understand that choices come after you earn money, and not before. Wondering what money values or habits you are modelling for your family? Check out the Role Model…
The “Learn More” Buttons
…with uncluttered easy-to-read screens. The pdf summaries which are automatically generated when children complete a Gift Survey, illustrate all the math and thinking that kids have gone through. So when…
The Style Question…
…tell people about yourself without saying a word. Does the styling (icons and sayings used, colour, design, length) of [the item being scored] tell people what you want them to…
It Had to be Green
…give their children is the habit of thinking before buying. You see, our free safe mobile surveys turn shopping for holiday and birthday gifts into a tool – to help…
What Gifting Sense Families Know
…in most households, time is short and commitments are high. By the time you’ve put away your holiday decorations, returned, exchanged or stored for re-gifting items received that didn’t quite…
Serve Socks to the Homeless: Holiday Hack #4
…collected every December and distribute them at an Out of the Cold dinner for the homeless at a local church in early January. For the price of a simple request,…
Just-In-Time Financial Education
…of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder believes these findings support the case for just-in-time financial education. You can read more…
