Comments on: Should You Give Kids an Allowance or Commission?

By: Tina Fortune

Tina Fortune — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 21:11:56 +0000

Great post! I pay my kids a stipend to go to school and perform. My children are 13, 11 and 5 and in the 8th, 6th and Kindergarten. I started paying them a year ago after my Director mentioned that he paid his kids. I was intrigued and asked him to explain. He asked me if I was paid to clean my home and of course I said no. So he said why should the kids be compensated for it. True! He told me to use my own method. I thought of a system that would work for me since I was a single/divorced mom of 3 and not receiving child support. I went with paying them $10 per grade level. A’s=100% B’s=50% for instance, my 8th grader can earn $80 per month. She has six classes so each A’s=$13.33 and B’s= $6.67 I do not pay for C’s or lower because in life we don’t get paid for below average work. Well, let me tell you, this method works! They work so hard and they love the idea of getting paid and having a budget. They still perform all of their chores and have a free day on Saturday’s and Sunday’s when I take their chores. Remember, we don’t get paid to do clean. I stress that we’re a team! My Kindergartner? He gets $5 per month and he’s happy too!Especially when the Ice Cream Truck comes along. Super post!

By: Bob

Bob — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 15:18:16 +0000

I love how my mom did this with my sister and I. We got a laminated grid with each of our weekly chores listed for each day: most of them were fairly simple, like making the bed, helping do the dishes, feeding the animals, and a few other things. On each day that we did the chore, we made a mark in the grid. Each mark was worth ten cents. Therefore, at the end of the week if you’d made your bed every day, you got 70 cents, and another 70 cents for doing the dishes and other “daily” chores. Then there were ~50 cent to $1 chores that were sort of one time or once weekly things, like helping with the laundry or raking leaves or mowing part of the lawn. At the end of the week, Mom tallied up the total. It was usually somewhere between $3-5 dollars, but of course the monetary amounts of the grid could change over time, from 5 cents to 10 cents. The daily chores were basically on the honor system, but it was visibly rewarded. It’s also stunning as a child to realize that a bunch of puny 10 cent jobs can add up to nearly a dollar at the end of the week! At least, it was to me. I think this combines the commission and flat allowance idea.

By: November Man Vs. Debt Recap! | Man Vs. Debt

November Man Vs. Debt Recap! | Man Vs. Debt — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:01:57 +0000

[...] 5th: Should You Give Kids an Allowance or Commission? [...]

By: Allowance For Kids

Allowance For Kids — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:48:28 +0000

[...] found this interesting article today on the subject, and found the comments on the post just as interesting as [...]

By: Andrew @ Financial Services

Andrew @ Financial Services — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:38:56 +0000

Of course we have to give them money for their needs, that’s already a given but I do think we also have to give them the chance to earn for things they want to buy. I personally wish my parents would’ve done that for me. Though I am thankful that my parents gave me everything that I needed back then, I wasn’t too fond of getting socks and shirts all the time on birthdays and occasions and I’m still quite disappointed with the fact that I almost never got any toys from them, even though they could afford it!

By: fwisp.com

fwisp.com — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:49:11 +0000

Should You Give Kids an Allowance or Commission?…

Teaching kids about money is a controversial, but important topic. Whether we like it or not, money management is a key element of our modern society. Few would suggest that it should be a central part of a child’s life, but even fewer would suggest co…

By: Grace

Grace — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:00:48 +0000

I felt my daughter was ready to start learning about managing money at age 8.
She is 16 now and recieves an allowance of $40 a month. She has assigned chores that are required, but they are not attached to her allowance. If she needs extra money there are extra chores she may do. When her allowance was attached to chores she would decide she didn’t want the money and the chore wouldn’t get done.

She will not be allowed to have access to a car until she can pay for her insurance and gas. I’m hoping this will motivate her to seek outside employment.

Like Elisabeth, I buy only very basic things for her. 2pr. jeans, tennys, undergarments and jacket as needed.

Still she seems to blow her money on music, games and movies. encouraging her to save has been a challenge.

By: Elisabeth

Elisabeth — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:50:21 +0000

Our girls (16, 13) get an allowance which is based on a budget of real expenses: they have lunch to buy at school (if they choose to), monthly bus passes and “misc”.

We gave them the math problem of calculating how much they needed (honed their math skills) and we pay them every Sunday. Chores are not tied to the allowance but they are expected to do their part.

We pay for “needs”, such as one pair of shoes per season, winter coat, school uniform, etc.

They pay for “wants” such as two, three or even four (!) pair of shoes per season, that really cool belt, another purse because they have 10 already, etc.

I must say the system is working great. I was tired of giving money every day for lunch, and then worrying once a month about the bus pass.
Now they do all of the work.

By: Kenneth Finnegan

Kenneth Finnegan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:30:07 +0000

Here’s one I’m kind of surprised I haven’t seen yet: The Bank of Parents.

Our mom setup a notebook with a balance sheet for each of us kids. When we had extra money we wanted to save, we could “deposit” it by giving it to her, and noting it down in the notebook. This worked well, since it made handling birthday checks easier, since we just had to endorse them, hand them to a parent, and write down how much it was for. It also gave Mom a supply of cash, which meant less trips to the ATM.
Our allowance was then 5% monthly compounded interest, so our allowance was only as big as we planned it out to be. This worked out to be 41 cents on the $100, and we typically had something along $400-$700 in our accounts at any one time, though both of us managed to get up to $1000 at one point or another.
As for getting the money out, this is where it got good. The parents would keep ~$20 in the notebook, so we could easily withdraw a few dollars to go out with friends, but if we wanted to buy something big (gameboy, scooter, etc), we’d have to go to the parents with a spending proposal, and get them to approve it.
This meant that not only did we have plenty of spending money to do with what we liked, and had incentive to consider the lost opportunity of spending that $25 birthday check from Grandma right away, but our parents still had tremendous control over our major spending habits. Then once we went to go open our first checking accounts before college, they just wrote us checks for however much was in our “accounts” as our first deposit in our real accounts.

By: What’s Sizzling? – November 7th Edition

What’s Sizzling? – November 7th Edition — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:44:01 +0000

[...] (and with good reason) is Zen Family Habits. This week, Baker from Man vs. Debt guest posted about whether we should give our kids an allowance or commission. [...]