When I was young, my mom had a jar “pick a job, 10 cents each.” These were special little jobs like sweeping the front porch. It worked well and taught work ethic early on. Maybe 50 cents would work better than a dime these days.

It has nothing to do with chores and cleaning up their room. For chores they can be paid extra–just like a job. Optional on their part but now you see where “earning” comes in.

Cleaning up their room is a matter of parental discipline. This is about the right and wrong attitude towards living in close proximity with other people. That’s a separate lesson.

One other thought: should you consider tithing?

Really good life lessons – a great mix between, spending, saving and giving away. I hadn’t heard about the $1.41 allowance but it makes perfect sense.

Thanks for sharing.

Merrill

Thats a good idea that the kids always have money to buy the parents gifts at Christmas time.

Thanks for sharing.

Merrill

That is really good advice. Really love the fact that you are teaching her to give something back at such an early age!

Good for you guys.

I will check out the links you provided.

Merrill

I give my kids $1.41/week (that’s $1, quarter, dime, nickel, penny). They just put it in their piggy bank. Then, every few months, we dump out the money, split it equally b/n Spend and Save, and then take a few bucks out of each for Share (charity). It’s not so easy to split $1.41 each week!

We don’t stipulate chores for the money–they lose toys or privileges for “not making wise choices.” The save is just going into a bank account, and we get to watch that grow. It’ll probably be for college.

My daughter surprised me recently–she was willing to trade out all her silver coins with her brother for all his copper ones. It made me crazy–she had no interest in the value!! So, right now they have NO access to their banks–I’m afraid the trade will happen without my knowledge. Ugh.

Like I said, a lot of effort, but worth the lessons!

Fun topic! We started giving our boys allowance when they were around 5. The initial reason for giving them anything was how often I would hear that my wife had bought a child some knick-knack, and it just felt like we (the big kids) were being nickeled-and-dimed by the little ones. So the idea was that the boys could then buy their own little stuff, or even save up to buy something bigger. “You can use your own money to buy yet another little Lego kit.”

Over time, the amount has gone up some; at 12 and 14 they like to go into town with their friends, and this usually results in the purchase of pizza, ice cream, or other similarly healthy foods. If it is a specific meal-time outing, we’ll pay for that as apparently we’re still on the hook for feeding them, but if it’s between meals…

We also require $2 to be given back to us out of each week’s allowance. $1 goes into their savings accounts, and $1 is for their respective Xmas accounts. We know how devastated the boys would be if they couldn’t buy mom and dad holiday presents, so we try to make the opportunity a wee bit more plausible.

That’s our approach.

Patrick

P.S. We tried the marble-thing for awhile but lost our marbles years ago.

There are a lot of reasons we started doing this, and giving her so much. The lessens we plan on teaching her with this money will prove to be invaluable as she gets older – and include both financial and social responsibility.

If she wants something bad enough, we will teach her to save for it, as an alternative to simply hounding me and my wife for it. Also, we will teach her that “X” amount goes to savings, “Y” amount is for what she may want to buy, and “Z” is for charity. We already started the charity thing about 2 years ago, since every birthday, she has to choose one gift to donate for “those children who don’t get as presents.”

I read a few articles a while back (and there are several) that spoke to this very issue, and we decided to implement it this year, as her cognitive abilities are such that she can now understand money, and we’re using this understanding to help teach her how to be responsible. We will likely increase it $1 per year old she is, with an eventual cap on it, but I haven’t thought that far ahead, as we just started.

Here are a few resources to check with regards to implementing an allowance structure for your kids:

http://www.ehow.com/how_14207_give-child-allowance.html

http://life.familyeducation.com/allowance/money-and-kids/48026.html

Sounds like we have 20% of a new league forming in September 2009.

Enjoy the weekend.

Merrill