Join me as we talk about our family's journey toward crafting a standout allowance system.
From personal growth experiences without an allowance to navigating my children's financial education, I reflect on how our choices have shaped their understanding of money and work. I'll give you practical tips that go beyond typical parenting debates, providing a fresh take on financial literacy for the younger generation.
Diving straight into the heart of our household, I reveal how we connect chores to allowance in a way that fosters responsibility and self-worth in our children. We'll talk about instilling a work ethic early on, differentiating wants from needs, and teaching kids about saving and spending. Our approach has transformed mundane household tasks into learning opportunities, helping our children aim high and dream big when it comes to their goals and finances.
Your insights and personal stories are the fuel that keep our conversations going, so feel free to slide into my Instagram DMs or hit the YouTube comments with your thoughts. Whether you're a seasoned parent or just starting to navigate the financial waters with your children, this episode is a treasure trove of ideas to help tailor an allowance system to your family's values and needs.
Join me as we talk about our family's journey toward crafting a standout allowance system.
From personal growth experiences without an allowance to navigating my children's financial education, I reflect on how our choices have shaped their understanding of money and work. I'll give you practical tips that go beyond typical parenting debates, providing a fresh take on financial literacy for the younger generation.
Diving straight into the heart of our household, I reveal how we connect chores to allowance in a way that fosters responsibility and self-worth in our children. We'll talk about instilling a work ethic early on, differentiating wants from needs, and teaching kids about saving and spending. Our approach has transformed mundane household tasks into learning opportunities, helping our children aim high and dream big when it comes to their goals and finances.
Your insights and personal stories are the fuel that keep our conversations going, so feel free to slide into my Instagram DMs or hit the YouTube comments with your thoughts. Whether you're a seasoned parent or just starting to navigate the financial waters with your children, this episode is a treasure trove of ideas to help tailor an allowance system to your family's values and needs.
Hey y'all, welcome back to another episode of Whatever with Heather. I got recording this episode and my phone only had 12 minutes left of video, so, in true mom fashion, I had to hurry and erase some videos and some pictures so that I could get this recorded. But now we're back at it. Today we're going to talk about our family's unique allowance system. We're going to talk about why our family started allowance, especially as someone who didn't grow up having an allowance. We'll talk about the benefits of allowance and do kids quote unquote even deserve allowance? And then we'll talk about our unique allowance system in our home, the reasons why we built it and the reasons it works for us, and then also some things we don't do regarding money and allowance in our family. First, let me give you a little bit of background.
Speaker 0:I grew up not having an allowance. I grew up with a single mom, and so from my perspective my mom might disagree or she might agree I feel like we kind of split the chores in the home equally. We were both doing chores. She worked full time, I was in school full time. I don't feel like our home got super messy because there were just two of us and obviously this is in the older years right, probably middle school, teen years so we split the chores equally and then I would get paid. If I did her chores For example, cleaning the master bathroom was her area and if I cleaned that I would get paid. I'd get paid like $2, but I'd get paid At the age of 12, 13, 14, 15, I was babysitting and that's how I'd earn some extra money. And then I started working at the age of 15, teaching swimming lessons, being a lifeguard, and that's also where I started to make my money. So that's kind of my personal background of my childhood and how I was raised. Then I became a mother and I never really considered whether or not I would want my kids to have an allowance. At the time I was a new mom. There were really only mom bloggers that were sharing their opinions on this. So there was the camp of kids don't deserve or need to be paid for doing chores in the home and I totally got that. And then on the other side was teaching money management to kids and giving them allowance. Totally got that too. So I really hadn't made a decision like my kids will for sure get allowance or will for sure not get allowance.
Speaker 0:Then fast forward. Our kids are probably the ages of like four and two or five and three right around there, and there were a couple things that made us start to consider an allowance. So the first thing that we noticed was our children's friends, even really little, would want something and they would save up money to be able to buy that thing. And I asked one of my friends I'm like where are they getting the money? And this friend said, oh, they get money from aunts and uncles and grandparents for birthdays and that's where they save up their money. In our family situation, our kids weren't getting money from grandparents. They would get gifts from grandparents and they have one aunt and they have no cousins, and so them saving up money from family gifts was not really an option.
Speaker 0:And around the same time our daughter really wanted a pair of light up shoes. You know where the heel lights up at this point in time we're on food stamps and I am not about to spend 20, 30, $40. I don't remember what it was on these light up shoes. So I tell her no, like we're not getting them, because I kind of knew she would like them for a little and not very long. But then I realized, like her childhood dream of light up shoes will only last so long. But my no, or my husband's no, was final on whether or not she could acquire something she really really wanted. So this point, there's kind of two things I'm seeing Our kids don't have the ability to save up money because they don't get any money from family or friends or whatever for gifts. And if there's something they really really want and we say no, even if it's just because we don't want to spend our money on it, there was no way for them to acquire or earn the thing that they really wanted. This doesn't mean that I think a parent's no like doesn't mean no. But I realized in that time like the true desire of her heart were these light-up shoes and my no was stomping on her dreams, with no chance of her ever earning or acquiring or buying these shoes. I could put myself in her position and also, as a mom, realizing childhood is so short, I kind of had two solutions I could just buy her the shoes she really wanted, or we could come up with a way in order for her to buy the shoes she really wanted, to work for them. These two main things kind of what we're triggering us considering some sort of way for our kids to make money, to earn money.
Speaker 0:So now let's talk about the benefits of allowance. Now I'm framing these benefits from an allowance that your children earn due to contributing in the home, not an allowance that they just get because they live in the home. Yes, I'm sure there are benefits to just getting some money in your home for just existing, but in order to create an allowance system that is real life, it is work equals reward, contribution equals reward. So here's the benefits to an allowance system where chores you contributing equals reward, and I will go into it later how ours is set up, how what chores are linked to allowance. But first let's talk about the benefits of allowance.
Speaker 0:First, they learn how to value their time and money. When our children are able to spend time and create something they want, which is money, they learn to value their time. They also learn to value your time. This kind of plays into having a chore system and an allowance system. We have both and I will share our chore system. People have asked for it and loved it. I'll share that in another podcast. So when they are tying their allowance to the things they're contributing in the home. They value their time and money. They also value those around them and their time and their money. They start to understand the value of work and the value of money. Another benefit is personal ownership and responsibility. This also ties into chores like. A huge benefit of your children having chores is the contribution, the responsibility, the ownership that you are trusting them with, being trusted or feeling like the people around you. Trust you with ownership and responsibility is huge for building confidence. It's huge for building self-worth. So allowance helps foster that as well.
Speaker 0:Allowance also helps children set goals. They start to figure out what do I want? How can I earn that? How long will it take me to earn that? They can ask do I really want that? Am I willing to save for that, and how long will it take them? Allowance can help with decision making. What will I buy? What won't I buy? What's worth it? What is worth spending my money on because I spent my time to earn the money. What's worth it? They learn and every kid learns this because even as adults do that you buy something you want that day and then later you don't care about it. Much better to learn that as a child than to do that as an adult, where you're making big purchases that you like for a month.
Speaker 0:If children are earning money, they can learn how to save, they can learn how to spend, they learn about working to make money. They are learning about finances. They are learning about life. A lot of our life is trading the time we have for money. It just kind of is the way the world works. Yes, there are other ways to make money than time for money, but initially it's very much a time for money type world we live in. The younger you can learn that and you can start to learn how to save and you can start to learn what spending is worth it to you. You can start to build these habits. You've now learned them in an environment where you're not having to pay for everything. You're learning wants versus needs versus worth it.
Speaker 0:At a young age, allowance also helps them build confidence. With saving and spending money. They know when they want to save, they know when they want to spend, and building that at the young age is so powerful because that can translate into the rest of your life, where, as adults, we know a lot of the rest of your life, if not the majority of it, is money driven. It is driven on what can you afford, what can you not afford. The benefits of learning this when you're young are endless learning these skills, learning the regret of buying something you didn't really want or you wanted in the moment, but don't care about it later. These skills are so important.
Speaker 0:So now the question is do kids quote unquote deserve allowance? My opinion is that kids deserve to learn how to save and spend money, and allowance facilitates that from a young age. We've talked about this with chores or with anything right. The more time you have to learn something and to develop a skill, the more skilled you are at that. That is why you like a doctor or an electrician or a teacher that has more experience. Typically you like somebody who has been there but also has been there for a long amount of time, who has done more work than other people. And so the more work and the more repetitions that your children can build for saving and spending, the easier, the more efficient, the more effective they become at saving and spending and they develop the pathways, the neural pathways, the discipline, the understanding of finances in a deeper way than if you were just to start doing that as a teenager.
Speaker 0:Okay, so now let's get into the fun stuff Our unique allowance system. I'm gonna share why we built it this way, what it needed to fill and then what it kinda looks like. This is the allowance system we have used for a decade and it works. We have not veered from this allowance system and I'm telling you this is it. Now.
Speaker 0:The first thing we really wanted in an allowance system, or the way we were gonna do allowance in our family, is that they were making enough money to save for things, but not so much money that they didn't value the work. The second thing we wanted to create was a system for if one child did the work and the other refused. Now remember, we have a three-year-old and a five-year-old or a two and a four-year-old. While we're building the system, they would make messes together and sometimes only one would pick up. If you have multiple kids, you know this. There's the one who will pick up and the one who won't. How do you deal with allowance in that situation? We wanted a system that solved that.
Speaker 0:We also wanted a system that accounted for if they whined or refused to do chores. Like lots of whining, I'm not saying, but like endless whining or fighting or arguing to the parents about doing chores. Remember again, they're three and five years old, two and four, right around there, probably two and a half and five. And those were things that were very real problems at that time. They can continue to be real problems now, as we have nine, 13, 15-year-old. But we needed an allowance system that accounted for refusal and accounted for whining. I'll tell you why whining in a little bit. So here's the result. What we created.
Speaker 0:The first thing was that they would get paid weekly at the end of the week. They get paid at the end of the week because their allowance is determined by the week. Before, the amount of allowance we determined was half their age every week. So at the age of five, our five-year-old was making $2.50 a week and our two, two, three-year-old she was probably closer to three was getting paid $1.50 a week. Now this was a perfect amount of money because they wanted things from the dollar spot. They wanted little things like that. But it also was enough money for our daughter that wanted light-up shoes, because if she's getting $2.50 a week at the end of a month, that's about $10. The end of two months, that's 20. At the end of three months, that's 30. Three months of work to save up to get your light-up shoes. Do you see, in order for her to get what she wanted, it would take saving, determination, setting a goal and continuing to go for it, not veering, not buying the thing from the dollar spot.
Speaker 0:Our daughters were so young at this age Of course, we're newer parents, so they felt really old, but looking back, they're so little, but they understood this. We also said that, since they were getting money when we would go to Target or Walmart or HEB or grocery store here, when we would go there and they wanted a treat at checkout that that was for them to buy, so we no longer had to answer for I really want this treat or can I have a treat? Because they now had the money to buy it. So we stopped buying treats. Now, of course, this isn't rigid. This doesn't mean we never buy our kids any treats or anything fun, but this meant in that moment, if they wanted it and it normally would have been a no from us they had the opportunity to buy it, but it was their money.
Speaker 0:Yeah, so they would have weekly pay. The pay is based off of half of their age and they had a set list of chores or responsibilities At the age of three and five. What did this look like? Their weekly responsibilities would be picking up their things, folding their laundry Yep, they mostly folded their own laundry at that age the three-year-old-ish, but for sure the five-year-old they were responsible for picking up their things and folding their laundry. That is where it started those two things. And they would do that and at the end of the week they would get their allowance. Now, for a three to five-year-old, you know the messes they make. So picking up things is not a small task, it's a big task.
Speaker 0:And here is how this played out. If, sometimes, our three-year-old would pick up and our five-year-old would refuse, what would happen is this if our younger daughter did the chore and picked up everything and our older daughter refused and would not do it, at the end of the week our older daughter would pay her sister out of her allowance. Now, this is something we'd keep track of. We would say okay, our oldest daughter is Addison, our youngest is Hannah. We'd say okay, addison, since you did not do the chore, you're going to be paying Hannah a dollar out of your allowance at the end of the week and therefore Hannah's allowance at the end of the week would be 250 and Addison's would be 150. Sometimes it was a 50 cent difference, sometimes it was a dollar.
Speaker 0:But at these younger ages the transferring of money happened semi-frequently because one would do the work and one would not do the work or would throw a fit about it. This made the situation way more fair for the child that was actually doing the chore and there would be a consequence for the child who was not doing the chore. It was an exchange in valuing each other's time and valuing each other's work. This worked so well to the point now where this never happens, to the point now where the transferring of allowance does not really exist. In our family Nobody is transferring their money to anyone else because they're all doing their responsibilities.
Speaker 0:Now let's talk about whining. If they would whine and whine and whine at me when I've asked them to do a chore that they know they needed to do, they would have to pay me out of their allowance at the end of the week for wasting my time, for wasting my energy. Or if they both refused to pick up, then they would both pay me at the end of the week and at that moment we'd be like okay, since you're whining so much, it's 50 cents that you owe me out of your allowance. So at the end of the week, if Addison had started with 250 and then she was whining and she owed me 50 cents, at the end of the week it's two dollars that she gets paid. So this money gets to move around because, remember, this is not money just based off of the existing. You are not just entitled to this money. This money is here for you and these are the contributions that you do for this money, and you're set with the full amount of money at the beginning of the week. So there's not a lot of pickup, you're still making the same amount of money, but if there's a lot to pick up, you're not making more. This is your allowance and these are the expectations for you to receive the allowance. So this, of course, has evolved over time. We now have a 15 year old she's getting paid 750 a week. We have a 13 year old she's getting paid 650 a week. And we have a nine year old he's getting paid 450 a week.
Speaker 0:Right, so they're all making money and as time has gone on, their list of chores has increased. They are fully responsible for their bedrooms and bathrooms, vacuuming, dusting, picking up, cleaning toilets, taking out trash all of that for bedrooms and bathrooms. They each do their own laundry from start to finish, except for our nine year old who does his laundry after it's dry, because our washer is so deep he can't reach the bottom of it. We move it from washer to dryer. It's dry, he puts it away. Bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry Anytime we ask them to do something for the dog, like feed the dog or get the dog water or let the dog in or out.
Speaker 0:Dog chores are included and then also a zone. Now we did the zone system a lot when we homeschooled because they were home more. Now I just pick out one or two chores each day. Sometimes it's one, it's usually one, sometimes it's zero that they're going to do that day, or I'll say, hey, pick a chore. So the other day my daughter was like Kam and a Dusty's blind. So I'm like perfect, love it. And I don't remember if I mentioned they also do a kitchen chore, whether that's unload, load or wash big dishes or put away big dishes or wipe down counters.
Speaker 0:Pretty much whatever we ask them to do in the kitchen to help contribute to getting the kitchen cleaned up is part of their chores. Now, like, those are their chores. I do not clean their rooms, I do not clean their bathrooms, I do not do their laundry, I'm not 100% responsible for the kitchen. And these are the expectations and they know them. This does not mean they don't sometimes ask, like can we do technology, can we play some video games before their chores are done? No, they continue to ask because they're human children, but they know the expectations. So we're just like hey, is your stuff done? Are your chores done? At the end of the week they receive their allowance and right now it's all just in an Excel spreadsheet because that's how I do it. There are apps for doing that, but we haven't done like green lights, an app where you can set an allowance where they have debit cards. We just haven't done that right now. It's not something we need right now as a family. So ours is just all in an Excel spreadsheet because that's the phase of life we're in. When they were kids, they wanted the money, they wanted the cash money in their hands and totally got that and the other thing that we have used this allowance system for.
Speaker 0:As time went on and they don't really whine about chores that much anymore. They've learned to just get it done, which is amazing considering they're 15, 13 and nine and for the most part our children don't whine about chores anymore. This took years and years and I'm so grateful to past, me and my husband way back in the past, that we just stuck with it, because now we have older children and they have put in the repetition and the understanding and have built the resilience to do chores and do work. We do not expect them to like, have a positive attitude and just love the chores they do because I don't love all the chores I do but we do expect them to not dump negative energy and whine the whole time they do chores. I often use myself as an example for them If they start getting a little whiny. I'm like imagine if every time I had to do dishes I just wind stood up there washing dishes, just whining, while y'all are hanging out with friends. Not cool, and that's just how we paint the picture here is. You wouldn't want me to do that, so how about you don't do that?
Speaker 0:This is kind of how we've gone about our allowance system and this has worked really, really well. It is an allowance system built on mutual respect. We respect our children and their right to learn to earn, to save, to spend, to have money to buy the things they really, really want if they're willing to save for them. And they learn to respect each other through the transferring of allowance based on chores. And they learn to respect hard work, because they do the work and sometimes it's more work and sometimes it's less and they're less entitled. And they learn to respect us as parents and the amount of work we do that we're not paid for because we're not paid for chores. Right, as a parent, you're not. They learn to respect that. So that is our allowance system Weekly pay half their age. Money can transfer to and from people. Money can be transferred to parents based on whining and increase in chores as increase in money happens.
Speaker 0:One other caveat to this would be like do you give extra money for extra chores? Yes, we do so. If there's something like, hey, one of our kids really really wants to earn money and I really need the art closet organized or I really need something done, that would normally be a me thing, they can get paid for doing things like that. Now, what do we not do that some people do? We do not give our children money for grades. I didn't get money for grades and we do not give our children money for grades. I don't disagree with parents that do that. I understand parents wanting to incentivize that. We just don't.
Speaker 0:We also are careful to not underpay or overpay for chores. So, for example, me cleaning my mom's entire master bathroom. That probably took me an hour or two. As a kid I get paid $2. Once again, as different times you got paid a lot less then, but we do not underpay and we do not overpay.
Speaker 0:When we are determining the amount to get paid for a typical chore, in my brain I'm kind of basing it off a rate of about $7 an hour. Now why not 15? Because that's what they get working somewhere else. One $15 an hour is not $15 an hour because you're gonna pay taxes, right. Also, teenagers don't need the $15 an hour wage that's going on right now because they don't have homes in cars so they are not paying for living expenses. So my children don't need paid a living wage. Yeah, a living wage is probably considered about $15 an hour right now, although I disagree that that's a living wage. But that's kind of what. You go to Chick-fil-A around here and get paid $15 an hour. So high schoolers get paid $15 an hour, but in our home they get paid probably $7, $8 an hour, because that is fair, it is not over and it is not under. It is realistic pay.
Speaker 0:We also don't pay for everything extra they do. I gave you the list of what we expect them to do their expectations clean their room, their bathroom, something in the kitchen, whatever their chore is in the kitchen, their laundry, pick up their stuff around the house, help with the dog and then an extra area in the house. Those are kind of the base of chores, but we don't always pay for everything extra they do. Sometimes the house has gotten a little way from all of us and we'll do a 15 minute cleanup where we are picking up as a family. So sometimes you're picking up other people's things. This also builds teamwork and mutual respect. They are not always paid for this and there is not really argument. This is building teamwork, this is building a good, healthy family dynamic. And after those 15 minute pickups I always make sure to say thank y'all for your 15 minutes, because here's the thing. They didn't have to do that right. I also don't have to do it because somehow we have everybody's stuff everywhere. We all know that this happens. It's everyone's stuff everywhere and those 15 minutes all of us contributing is like one of us doing an hour and 15 minutes of work and they've learned to respect the 15 minute pickup and we just do it, get it done, and it always makes such a big difference.
Speaker 0:The other thing we don't do is expect the same amount of work in the summer as in during the school year. Now, when we homeschooled, their level of chores was always the same. Now that they are in school and have less hours and they have after school activities and sometimes before school activities, we do not expect the same. So they still kind of have those base chores that I listed earlier. But during the school year we don't do zones and the zone is a much bigger thing. You're in charge of the entire office and during that week you dust and vacuum and blinds and all of the things listed on that. You do that during the week. We do not do that during the school year. We also understand that part of being a kid is to enjoy your life and so we do not drown them just to drown them in chores. Definitely intentional reasons. Why are we doing this? What is the benefit? Who does it help? How do they grow? And that's what we're asking when we build anything in our family the chore system or the allowance system Our biggest goal as parents is to build long lasting relationships with our children and to raise capable humans.
Speaker 0:We want them to reach adulthood and not be overwhelmed by all the things that come with being an adult. They probably will be overwhelmed by a lot of it anyway, but we can set a really nice foundation of chores and daily tasks so that they can build that, and also saving and spending. That is a foundation we can build for them moving forward into adulthood. We want them to feel capable. We want them to know that we believe they are capable. We want them to know that we trust them, so we give them opportunities to build trust. I'll do a whole separate podcast on trust, because trust is an interesting thing to teach children and teach it in a way that makes sense to them and is actually fair, because sometimes you don't trust all your children equally. I'll do a whole podcast episode on that, but this is what we are trying to instill in our children.
Speaker 0:This is our unique allowance system. I hope this served you. If you have any questions, send me a DM on Instagram or comment on the video on YouTube, and I would love to get back with you. I'll probably eventually do like a formal YouTube video on this, where I break it all down with charts and stuff, but for right now, this is it. Let me know if you decide to do an allowance system similar to this, because I'd love to hear it. I know multiple families that have taken this system and have loved it. I am so excited to have gotten to share this with you today and thank y'all for being here and I will see you next week. Bye.