Lacking a Nail

Everyone in our household has an allowance. Even the adults. Riley** started her allowance when she was three-years-old. My spouse and I have had an allowance our entire marriage, regardless of how much we contribute to the family pot, we get the same amount. Skip the next two paragraphs if you want to jump straight to the explanation of the child allowance.

The Adult Stuff

Our finances are a shared pot style finances. We each have our own savings account. Like everything there are caveats, essentially everything we earn is family money and it goes into the joint accounts. Specifics are for another post in Pennies & Cents, I’m only trying to establish the family perspective on money.

The adult allowance is pretty straight forward. We currently get $75 a month, it goes into our individual savings accounts, we do whatever we want with it. We usually tell each other what we got because we like to share not out of obligation. We actually increased our allowance when Riley started hers. It was $50 a month, which Riley would have been exceeding in the blink of an eye and I wasn’t about to be giving more allowance to the child than the adults. But you’re not here for the adult allowance, you’re here for the breakdown of the child allowance.

Our Philosophy on childhood allowance

We don’t have chores. Our allowance system is purely for being a member of the family. Why don’t we have chores? Simple, we don’t really have a cleaning routine that we stick to. So I’m not going to require the young child to clean the baseboards every week in order to get her money when we don’t reliably do our cleaning tasks. It feels hypocritical. Riley also still doesn’t care about her allowance, so the only drives to complete chores would be fun, desire to please, avoidance of punishment. As she grows and starts caring about money we’ll have to discuss the money for work angle.

Riley is paid weekly, she is given $1 for each year. At three years, Riley made $3 a week and $12 / $15 a month. She’ll make $156 over the year. At 12 it will be $12 each week or $48 / $60 a month, or $624 for the year. That’s the trouble with allowances. When you look at the weekly amount it’s a pittance, especially if you make them split it into categories. When you start stepping out to see how much you’re budgeting for the year. That’s when you question it.

We do subscribe to requiring her to divvy up her money into categories which means that money, while a lot, becomes too little pretty quickly. I built off of the Spend-Save-Give model. For the sake of alliteration I also changed Give to Share.

The categories

Spend – Pretty obvious, this is the spending money. It can be taken and spent anywhere right away.

Save – Have a goal that can’t be bought right away, that’s what we save for.

Share – Do you want to share with a person, an organization, to try and help. We choose to share what we have with others. Which means we do need to have a rough idea of what the money will go towards. We went to a religious preschool so she shared at their worship for a short while, but the share money has just been building up.

Store – This is my attempt at introducing investing. I think I’ll introduce “interest” after her next birthday. The “interest” will be five cents for every dollar in the store jar the last Sunday of the month. When she gets old enough to receive her allowance bi-monthly interest will be the last Sunday of the month.

The Breakdown

Spend, Share, and Save are equal amounts while Store is a small amount. Since there is a $1 raise every year, the amounts increase by 25 cents annually. No I did not come up with a fourth category because it’s easier to divide a dollar into quarters than thirds.

Most years, allowance will require quarters, a lot of quarters.

Year 11 Riley will have $3 in the share, save, and spend jars and $2 in the store jar each week. The year before that; it would be $2.75 and $1.75 respectively. That’s $156 in quarters for that year alone.

I start accumulating the money necessary for the next year about 6 months before the birthday. I do this for three reasons.

1. I just want it all set up well in advance of when it’s needed.
2. It’s a nice chunk of money to pull out of one paycheck so I spread out the blow.
3. If you ask tellers for more than a few rolls of coins they give annoyed.

The Set-Up

When looking for allowance containers, your first desire may be the classic piggy bank. One thing you need to keep in mind is how will you get the money out. The piggy bank style is cute, but having to try and shake coins out of the small hole or fish out bills gets old fast.

Our first set-up was cleaned Bonne Maman jars. This was before I added the step of periodically going through to replace the dollar bills with higher denominations and those jars filled up fast. If I had thought about changing out the $1’s and quarters sooner I probably would have kept the Maman jars. But I didn’t so I went hunting for replacements.

I wanted containers that were the same style but different colors. So they were obviously a set but I could tell which category it was at a glance.
I wanted it to have the category written on it somewhere, while I was learning the color.
I wanted to have easy access, both for putting the money in and repeatedly taking it out.
I wanted it to be able to hold more than the Bonne Maman jars.

I bought four personalized wooden piggy banks from Amazon. The product is no longer available and one of the closest matches I found appears to open on the bottom, not the side like mine.

To label the boxes I got vinyl alphabet stickers.

The book I had intended to read regularly (but have not) is The Four Money Bears by Mac Gardner. Which was the only one I was able to find in my quick search that included the concept of investing money.

The Theory & The Reality

In theory, every Sunday we do the allowance, it gets divvied into the four piggy banks and we have some sort of discussion about what she wants to spend on, save for, and share her money with.

In reality, we forget the money outright and I end up sliding a few weeks worth of allowance in her piggy banks when I decide to catch up. Riley doesn’t care at all so any conversation about money goals is some sort of torture. Or entirely outlandish. Our saving goals have included dogs, cats, bounce houses, playground sets, etc. Many a time it has devolved into me getting frustrated and telling her to just put the money in, because she refuses to talk about it.

We have gone to the local discount store, but they’ve increased their prices a couple of times and now she is unable to purchase even one item with her weekly spend money.

Since she doesn’t have any idea who or what she wants to share with she’s amassed a ridiculous sum in her share piggy bank. Since we don’t really go out shopping she usually builds up a tidy sum in her spending piggy bank. Again, since we don’t do to much shopping there are no savings goals.

On the bright side, she is starting to get that money is used to get stuff. She is starting to want stuff from advertisements. So the connection is starting to be made.

Our inconsistent shopping and the fact that almost all of our cash is digital is making money a difficult concept to teach.

What do you do for allowance? Are you a “money for being part of the family”, “money for work”, or combination of the two?

**I use pseudonyms—Reid (partner) and Riley (kid). I use soft time phrases. I post after leaving locations. I keep titles regional, specific locations will only be mentioned within a post if at all.

I’m learning in public. I try small, doable routines and adjust as life allows — no timelines, no perfection, no one-right-way. I share what happened, what worked, what didn’t, and how I’ll tweak it — honest notes and small moves forward. One tiny move is progress.

Personal experiences only—this isn’t professional advice. See Disclosures and Terms.