Paying Our Children And Allowance

We go back and forth about wanting to pay our kids each an allowance. They are five and three years old now and for the past year or so have both been receiving money regularly from one set of Grandparents at each holiday. I know we need to start them off young but considering I wasn’t given an allowance until I was about 10 years old, I didn’t see the need. My husband’s situation growing up didn’t help as he was given $20 a week during high school but nothing before that.

I just read this article titled Should Your Kids Get An Allowance on the MSN Money network and after a brief chat with my husband, we are going to start giving the kids an allowance starting now. Now my decision goes to the amount each should get and where to save it.

The money they have received from their Grandparents usually gets put on the fridge witha magnet. The kids just like knowing that they have money and they know where it is. They wanted to each hold on to it when their Halloween money came, but it was lost within a few days. The problem with not having a specific place for their money is the parents usually end up grabbing it for whatever reason. We rarely carry cash with us, but if someone comes to the door selling girl scout cookies (as happened a couple of weeks ago) I grabbed some money that was stuck to the fridge to buy it. I suppose it would be easily justified as the kids wanted (and thus ate) the majority of the cookies, but that also shows that it doesn’t matter if you spend all that you have. That is not the message I want to send to them.

I remember my mom paying the bills when I was a kid – she kept everything neatly filed and would sit down with her checkbook to pay everything. My bill paying is so different since it is mostly done online. My kids can’t see me write a check, address an envelope and add a stamp.

I think I will get them each two small banks or something to put money in and we will decide how much to save and how much they can spend.

Technorati Tags:

Recent Entries

Comments are closed.