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Another benefit of discussions many parents are forced to have with their children about troubled family finances is that they open the door for further guidance on the topic. Before children go out on their own, preparing them for the realities of the world is often limited to lifestyle topics. While those are certainly important discussions to have, the first few years outside of your care are also when they’ll establish many of the financial habits that will guide the rest of their lives.

In his Letter to My College-Bound Daughter, Money Magazine contributing writer Dan Kadlec imparted what many children at this age need to hear. The letter was a masterful balance of gentle advice and relinquished control. Without missing the fact that most of the lessons in college are learned outside the classroom, he advised his daughter to enjoy every minute of it, but to be careful, too. The high level advice of furthering one’s financial education, living within one’s means, and building a credit history with responsible use of credit is beneficial to all students beginning their lives in the real world.

Young college students are often experiencing many things for the first time. Along with the lack of parental oversight comes personal responsibility for consequences. Allocating a portion of your advice for matters of money will serve your children well. It is in these early years that massive student loan debt and a tarnished credit history can erase many of the potential financial gains a college degree can afford.

Our kids are going to make mistakes in all aspects of their lives. Some lessons are best learned through experience, both good and bad. As parents, there is only so much we can do for our children. Eventually we have to trust that the lessons we have tried to instill will carry them as they venture out on their own. A positive relationship with money is surely not the most important of these virtues, but it is one upon which our children will certainly rely.

What do you wish you knew about money back when you were heading off to college?

The troubled economy has been hurting many families for quite some time, though the effects are starting to be felt by a new group of people: teenagers. Many parents, who have always been the major funding source for their kids’ spending, have started saying “no” out of financial necessity.

The New York Times detailed this trend in The Frugal Teenager, Ready or Not. The article cites a survey that found “discretionary spending by teenagers, whose money comes from allowance, gifts and part-time jobs, had dropped 27 percent to $2,600, from its spring 2006 peak of $3,560.” While a portion of this may be attributed to cutbacks in part-time positions by struggling retailers, reduced handouts from Mom and Dad are likely a key factor as well.

Children asked to cut back on their spending responded in a number of different ways, but disbelief about the reality of family finances seemed to be the most common. One woman found her children more receptive to cutbacks after showing them specifics of their household expenses. It would seem that for all their confidence on the subject of money, few teenagers realize the actual costs of running a household. What’s more, parents who themselves are novices in personal finance have little hope of adequately teaching the subject to their children.

It’s not surprising for children who have always gotten what they wanted to be confused by difficult times. In many cases it’s more likely the parent’s fault for having always said yes. Regardless of where the blame lies, it is difficult to find a solution to this case, if one even exists.

As more children become affected, the problem may moderate itself to some degree. Frugality and thrift could become trendy as more children engage in the practice out of necessity. That, along with an increased awareness of financial constraints and learning to decide between multiple wants could be a real positive outcome of this whole mess. Whether you’ve always given your children just what they’ve needed, everything they wanted, or some combination of the two, now is an excellent time to further their financial education. You’ll likely learn something along the way as well.

Have you recently had to curtail your children’s spending? How did they react?

There are many occasions for giving gifts, especially to children. And one of the biggest occasions is coming up: Christmas. You might give clothes that the children can wear or some toys that will keep their attention, or you can gift them some shares of stock.

Buying them shares of stock might set a different course for their financial lives and get them interested in investing and personal finance at a young age. If presented as a fun game, kids will usually enjoy the experience and will want to learn more. You can even download software for them to track their stocks or you can use a simple spreadsheet.

There are different ways to accomplish this. If you already use a brokerage house, there might be offerings available to help you, so check that out first. You can also use a service like OneShare to buy one share and have a certificate framed and sent to you. OneShare might not be the best option if you plan on adding more shares. The last option is to open a guardian account with a low-cost broker. This would also allow the children to log in and track their investments in all kinds of graphs and get them accustomed to online investing.

Once they have their shares, you can also introduce the children to fantasy stock markets where they have an imaginary amount of money to trade and compete with other children. There are many benefits to having children learn stock investing. A good place to begin might be Young Money, where they can start with an imaginary $10,000 in fantasy money.

If you wish to give something more hands-on, consider Cash Flow for Kids, or the regular Cash Flow game if the children are older. Cash Flow makes it real and offers a fun way to learn the basics of personal finance.

Whichever gift you decide to give, make sure it’ll be something more than just a temporary moment of excitement and continue to pay dividends for a long time.

A good home improvement project takes time, perseverance, and patience.

Oh. And money. Lots and lots of money.

To replicate the designs seen on Extreme Home Makeover or Priced to Sell or insert-HGTV-program-here, you'll have to do some renovating on your wallet and maybe even your savings account. To upgrade a kitchen or bathroom, you could find yourself downgrading a family vacation or graduate school. Home improvement projects do not come on the cheap.

But there are some alternatives to outright wall-banging and deconstruction. A new lamp here, a refurbished end table there, and you have yourself a new room. Redecorating, it seems, is the frugal way to flip the feeling of your favorite pad. Sorry, middle income Bob Vila wannabes. You might be out of luck.

Knowing the inexpensive way to go, however, does not solve all your money problems in one fell swoop. Simply deciding on redecorating over remodeling actually opens up an entire new world of possibilities and a whole new batch of money decisions. There are big box stores and mom-and-pop shops that specialize in helping you redecorate your home, and there are other alternatives for redecorating found online or even in your own garage. Which one is the cheapest way to go? Let's find out:

1. Personal: DIY

Going the do-it-yourself (DIY) route would make Tim "the Tool Man" Taylor proud, but is it right for you? If you are a Mr. Handy McTool, then whittling a new coffee table out of an old shed might be the best option. But for those of us who can't turn a beat-up bicycle into an artful dining room diorama, we might not find this alternative that easy.

Its cheapness can't be understated, though. A lot of do-it-yourself projects begin and end with the stuff you have lying around. There's no need to go out and replace yesterday's clutter with today's filler when you can jimmy-rig something you currently own to do the trick.

There is an intrinsic reward in completing a project by yourself, too. Working with your hands is one of the lost skills that our society has started to ignore. Getting back to the way our forefathers got by is a fulfilling experience, and it continues to be so every time you look at your new creation.

Intangible rewards are nice and all, but they don't matter much when it comes to how much money is in your pocket. The nitty-gritty of DIY projects is how prepared you are to undertake a task. If you have everything you need lying around the house, then you shouldn't end up spending more than few dollars on your finished product. If not, then you might find DIY rather NFM (not-for-me).

Raw material costs for something as simple as shelves in your garage could run you a pretty penny. And while wood from a lumberyard is not as expensive as pre-made shelves from the store, the costs can add up if you need to buy yourself tools or extra supplies.

2. Online: Craigslist

Like a glorious Internet flea market, community sites like craigslist.org (and community second-hand stores, for that matter) are a great place to find inexpensive upgrades for your current decor. Most of the people on craigslist are folks just like us - hoarders with too many of this and too much of that lying around the house and in desperate need to pawn it off on someone else.

Craigslist pros can find incredible deals on virtually any product you can imagine. The beauty of places like craigslist is that pretty much everything you could need for a redecorating project is somewhere in the site's postings. You just have to be able to find it. And once you do, chances are good that it will be significantly cheaper than if you had gone to the store and bought the item brand new. Craigslist merchandise is pre-owned, so it should always come with a discount.

In the same vein, being pre-owned could mean trouble. A lot of folks are desperate to bum their junk off on others, and they will say or show whatever they need to in order to get their item sold. To find just the right product, you might need to commit to a one-on-one visit with that boudoir you've been coveting. You'd hate for it to be missing a drawer. Or smell like cats.

3. In-store: IKEA

There should probably be a distinction made when discussing shopping for home furnishings in a retail store. There are basically two different kinds of places to buy: the eye-gougingly-expensive, designer emporiums and the wholesale, big-box bargain shops. Let's go ahead and assume that the former is not exactly a wise budget move, and we'll focus on the latter.

IKEA, with its Swedish designs and sweet savings, broke the mold when it comes to cheap home furnishings. Everything IKEA makes was built with consumer savings in mind - from the assembly-required ethos to the affordable boxing and packing. Even better, the entire catalog of IKEA products is trendy, modern, and beautiful.

It is not, however, dirt cheap. IKEA items are inexpensive by comparison to expensive competitors, but they will still cost more than D-ingIY or surfing Craigslist. They're brand new, so IKEA can't just be giving them away. Finding the right product at the right price would be key to making an option like IKEA any sort of feasible.

Let's recap: Remodeling a home is expensive. Redecorating is not. And if redecorating is your way to go, then you can't do much better than by trying options like DIY, craigslist, or IKEA.

But which one is the best? That answer is entirely up to you.

If you are industrial and enjoy working with your hands, then a do-it-yourself project might be right up your alley. Plus, if you have most of the tools and materials at your disposal already, then you could get away with paying next to nothing for your new anything.

If deal-hunting is your thing and you don't mind second-hand hand-me-downs, then craigslist might be your calling. Just remember to try before you buy and to learn how to sniff out the special deals.

If neither of the above are your M.O. and you're simply in the market for affordable, fashionable at-home pick-me-ups, then IKEA is right for you. A word of advice, though: Don't forget to keep your budget in mind when you're in the store lest you run the risk of a Swedish shopping stupor.

When you read about urban survivalists stockpiling “beans, bullets, and band-aids” in these tough economic times, it’s only natural to consider what you would do in a worst-case scenario. One item that is often overlooked is our current dependence on electronic monetary transactions. As I discussed in Cashless Society, cash has a declining role in most of our lives. When I say cash, I don’t mean liquid investments or cash equivalents, but rather actual currency within your reach.

At any given time, I probably have an average of less than $10 in cash. I suppose that if I really looked hard, I could probably scrounge together about $50 from my coin jar, State Quarter collection, and my daughter’s piggy bank. This lack of cash in my life begs the question of what would happen if our electronic banking system were somehow disrupted, through a major computer glitch or deliberate attack.

Imagine that ATMs, electronic transfers, and credit/debit purchases no longer worked. I suppose stores could process cards using a manual machine, as they used to do, but few even have the old technology available. Checks might still be accepted, though they too often rely on electronic verification. There would likely be long lines at the banks and it’s reasonable to assume that even they could be affected by such an outage. The same technology that allows you to withdraw money from every branch of your bank likely means that an individual branch doesn’t have your account balances but instead relies on a computer connection to some central location. Such a scenario would basically mean that you would have no access to cash.

Such a catastrophic failure of the banking system probably wouldn’t affect you in some ways that you might expect. I doubt that utility companies would shut off service for non-payment if none of their customers had a method to pay for it. If the outage lasted more than a few days, you’d probably have bigger problems to worry about than the lack of access to cash. An extended outage that affected everyone would probably also lead to government intervention to help citizens through it. An outage of a few days is much more plausible. If you can’t imagine such a scenario lasting more than a few minutes, remember that all commercial flights in the US were grounded for a few days after the September 11th terrorist attacks, which previously would also have been seen as impossible. Even a few days without access to alternative forms of money could expose the weakness of not having any cash on hand.

At a minimum, you may want to be sure to have some cash when you gather other survival supplies ahead of a big storm. To be safe from unexpected events as well, it makes sense to always have access to a small stockpile of cash. The amount that you choose should be aligned with your expectations of the duration of the outage. I wouldn’t recommend having too much cash on hand because it doesn’t earn interest and is at risk of theft. Nonetheless, having enough to survive a short period without access to other forms of money may be in your best interest.