Our allowance program helps parents and kids discuss and create an allowance program that works for both parents and kids.
Our goal is for you to make an allowance a learning experience.
As a Kid – Why should you get an allowance?
- Need to have money to buy things.
- Need to learn how to save money.
- Want to be more independent with your own money.
- Want to learn to be responsible with your own money.
- Don’t want to always be asking your parents for money.
- Need to learn how to earn money.
- Want to learn skills such as identifying opportunities to make money and negotiate the price to complete tasks.
What are you trying to accomplish with an allowance?
Parents perspective:
- Provide an incentive to do jobs around the house .
- Teach a value associated with work and being managed to perform work.
- Reward for certain accomplishments.
- Teach money management – this is how much you have to spend to set your priorities – learn to save for things you want.
- Teach negotiation skills in determining the amount of allowance to be paid.
- Budgeting purposes – this is how much money you can have for personal spending – makes household budgeting easier.
- You don’t want to be asked for money all the time.
- Seems to be the thing to do – lots of other kids seems to have an allowance.
- To teach the value of money. To have kids earn money and make decisions on how to save and spend money.
As you can see there are many reasons why kids want allowances and why parents are willing to give one. There is no right answer, but it is worth challenging the status quo and coming up with reasons and benefits that suit your household and family needs.
Ideas to Consider:
Allowance Contract to put the allowance agreement in writing.
Kids:
Prepare a written recommendation to your parents on why you should be granted an allowance. Our resource center has a “recommendation format” to help you.
You need to give some thought to why you need it, how you will benefit and most importantly how you will learn about managing your own money – saving, putting it in a safe place, not losing it, setting up a bank account.
Adults:
Ask your children to prepare a recommendation on why they need an allowance, how they plan to save and spend their money, what portion of their money will be saved and what they will learn from having the privilege of an allowance.
Our recommendation program will help kids prepare a Recommendation.
I think the most important lesson for an allowance is to learn to manage money. It is easy to spend money, but it is important to appreciate how hard it is to earn. Explain to your children how many hours of work, at minimum wage, they would have to work to earn their allowance.
Another important lesson is to learn to do with less – do you really need the things you want to buy.
Learn to manage priorities and balance healthy choices, education, savings and just stuff.
The idea of using an allowance, to spend the money on other people, is also an important lesson. Learn how to share – by using your money to benefit other people including charities.
There are many lessons in life that can be learned from the simple concept of an allowance. Give it some thought and do it in a way that: expectations are set, goals are set and money is used wisely.
Understanding a Job
This is also a good time to discuss jobs. Use your allowance program as on opportunity to create jobs and help kids learn how to perform tasks to complete a job well.