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If Santa (or Grandma) will be giving the kids cash for Christmas this year, turn it into a teachable moment.

I’ve discussed how much I love ING DIRECT. Now ING has established a great tool to teach kids about money. Just visit orangekids.com. Cedric & Amy will provide your kids an interactive way to learn about money. Additionally the site provides teachers with lesson plans to accomplish the same goal.

If you Planet Orange is a little too spacey, you could also check out the US Mint Kids’ Website.

The daughter of Hugh Hefner, Christie Hefner, was the CEO of Playboy for 21 years. She recently spoke to the students of Syracuse University, providing 7 tips for success:

1. Lose the jargon - “Try not to be either intimidated by or a captive of jargon. Even though it’s language, and language is about communication, it often exists actually to obfuscate, and to control power, and not to communicate.”
2. Don’t ever stop meeting people - “I don’t think you can know too many smart people.”
3. Don’t ever stop trying to learn - “If you ever get to a point where you stop learning you will find your professional options and your personal satisfaction severely curtailed. Because this world is changing much too quickly.”
4. Read history - “I learned more about leadership reading about Abraham Lincoln than I ever learned reading The One-Minute Manager.”
5. Really listen – “For smart people leadership is harder, ironically, because you’re already a step ahead so you’re not really listening. There’s a wonderful expression that a strategic facilitator I worked with years ago gave me that I love, which is ‘When you’re in a meeting and someone comes up with a new idea, don’t send a heat-sinking missile’, and what that means is, you know what the easiest thing to do is? Find the fatal flaw. It’s to say, ‘Well that won’t work because…’ What you really want, if you’re a leader, is to create a culture in which instead of that being the reaction, what people say is ‘Well that’s a really interesting idea, I wonder if we just twisted a little bit this way…’ So you’re nurturing ideas instead of killing them in their infancy.”
6. Learn how to learn – “If I learned to value one quality above all others in interviewing for senior positions, it was actually not IQ, although I do like smart people, it was intellectual agility.”
7. We are each our own brands – “All the decisions you make, all the interactions you have with people, all the things you do and don’t do will accumulate and define what your brand is. I hope you treat your brand well.”

As the daughter of Hugh Hefner, I am certain Christie has lived among much criticism and high expectations. Say what you will about the line of work, but I like the advice. Some thoughts:

2. What’s the old adage? “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”

3. Our world is ever-changing – more so now than ever before in human history. If you are not keeping up, you are being left behind.

4. History over leadership books? Interesting. I just began reading “Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant“, so I guess that is a little bit of both.

5. This is huge. Given how quick our business environment is changing, if you can’t rely on the experts around you, you will be hard-pressed to keep up.

6. Learn how to learn – I like this. For Gen Y, we have infinite information at our fingertips. Our challenge is to learn how to manage that info.

7. This reminds me of another great blog post.

via Christie Hefner’s Advice for College Students – ABC News.

“Good Debt” was an extremely popular term…before we entered into a recession. These days, it is a little less cool. But is there a such thing as “Good Debt” and does education qualify?

Pro: Sarah Evans, director of communications for Elgin Community College:

“Education is the one investment no one can ever take away from you,” says Evans. “It is not market-dependent, nor will it ever decrease in value. I am confident in my conscious choice to go into good debt for higher education.” Amy Perrin, director of student financial assistance at ECC, echoes Evans’ sentiment. When she advises students and parents about the cost of college, she asks they consider the benefits of having a degree.

Con: Robert Pagliarini, president of Pacifica Wealth Advisors, Inc. and author of the bestselling The Six-Day Financial Makeover:

“Experts have said education debt is always good debt, but I completely disagree.” According to Pagliarini, it’s like saying food – any kind of food – is good. We all know that’s not true. It’s got to be the right kind of food. He feels going into debt to get a degree or to increase your skills is smart if it will translate into a better job and more money.

I would have to take sides against education debt. Why? Ask all of the recent college graduates. They will certainly tell you why! By borrowing for education, in essence, students are (to use a blackjack term) doubling-down on their ability to find a quality job after graduation.

Now, obviously recent graduates did not see today’s recession looming 4 years ago. But here we are. Lesson learned…I hope. And to make matters worse, six months after graduation the student loan payments begin. Yikes!

By borrowing money for school, students are taking the risk associated with debt and transferring it to their job search. This doubles and triples their desperation to find the perfect job any job they can find. Lest we forget, this logic assumes the college experience results in a marketable degree. If you finish school with a pile of debt and a degree in Artist Psychology, then what do you do?

In the end, student loans are not ‘good’ debt and I think the current job market is plenty of support for this claim.

via Does Good Debt Exist? | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.