Kids allowance...

agoldlife

Dave Ramsey has a pretty good system to teach kids responsibility with money. We're incorporating that now with our 3 year old.

Thanks for this information I looked him up and have begun to impliment some of his methods as a family. Thank you again.

Smansfield1

I have 4 yr old twins & a 3 year old... they have 4 chores they have to do every day and if they do it, I give then a quarter. Its not alot but they think its cool. Probably helps they are pretty naive when it comes to things like video games and stuff like that. Their favorite place to go is the Dollar store.

MonkeyLover1993XxX

i didnt get money as at nearly 19 i still dont thing is my parents saved it and when i wanted/needed somthing like a bed cover or anything we would go out and pick buy it toghter or when we was verry little and there was 8 of us we use to go on day trips out were we got to pick sweat and an icecream 1s a month.
but its made me grow up to not really ask for money or things and try to earn it myself.
or we put the monkey in to a bank acount and saved it up till we hit a certain age to get it out <you save alot this way

klynn81

Allowance? This is a foreign concept to me, never got it. :bigsmile:

lol. I was about to say the same thing. Wow, I think I got hosed. lol. jk

dalgirly

I always liked how my parents did it. We never got allowance but we had a list of chores with a money value attched to them. We still had to do basic chores, but we got money for doing extras. I liked it that way because I feel it taught us that we weren't just handed things in life, that to get something we had to work for it.

veganbaum

I dont remember what my allowance was but I remember my mother had me keep a ledger. I had to report how I used the money given me down to the penny.
If I earned money she gave me an additional 50% of what I earned. So If I cleaned a neighbor's yard and they paid me $10 she'd give me $5 more.
If I saved money she matched what I saved. If I got a good value on my money she reimbursed me for my purchase. My allowance was not tied to chores but to how well I managed to base amount.
I give my 10 year old $5 a week as a base anything else is "earned". My 4 year old doesn't know to the names and values nor can he do the math money management requires. He is not given an allowance.

I really like that idea of a "base" and teaching earning as well as money management. I also think 4 is too young for an allowance, or if one is given I would think something very small is sufficient, like $1 for their base.

klynn81

Yes, they will be getting money without earning it but they also are performing jobs they get no reward for. I think there are lessons in both.

I can't say one parents ways are right or wrong, but I will say that from an early age we were expected to do things to help out around the house (make our beds, clean our rooms, laundry, dishes, sweep, vacuum, dust, set and clear the table for meals) and outside (feed the animals, weed whip, mow the yard, shovel snow, bale hay, lay bedding for the animals in the barn). No allowance.

Sure when I was younger, I hated that I had to do more things at home than probably half of my friends, yet they always seemed to have anything and everything bought for them that they could possibly want. Maybe I didn't get the immediate reward like many of my friends did, but I know that learned what it meant to be a hard worker, to value my money, how to be responsible, and even more grateful for how hard my parents worked to provide for us....there isn't always an immediate reward for all your hard work, but there is always a reward. It doesn't always have to be in the form of money!

skylark94

My son has opportunities to earn his "commission". We don't just hand him money. We do $1 per year, so right now he has the opportunity to earn $7 a week because he is 7 years old.

jennmoore3

I made a chart for the twins. It had 2 things to do each day, so 14 chores to do a week.

For example monday and wednesday was fold 1 basket of clothes, and clean the movie stand. (We have a lot of DVD's and they get all messy when they watch movies so I had them straighten them back up in order to where they were all lined up like books in a library on their sides, no crazy like ABC order) Anyways then Tuesday and thursday were something like Clean the bathroom sink and counter, and straighten up the shoe bin. no one puts shoes in the bin, they toss them on the floor in front of the door, drives me crazy.

For everything it had a $ amount, so the total was 5 bucks a week. it would be 25 cents here then 75 cents there, a dollar for this. ect. Then I told them that the first week I would remind them to do the chores so they could get into the swing of things. The next week chores were switched up between the kids and they were on their own. If it wasn't done, then no money for that chore, so I would deduct it from the total of 5 dollars.