When I was a kid, I had a list of chores to do. Some of them were completely to my benefit, like making my bed every morning and putting my clothes away. But I was also required to set and clear the table every night. My brother got trash and lawn duty. My sister had to load and unload the dishwasher. We all had to rake the yard every fall, and shovel the walks every snowstorm.
My mom didn’t have us do bathroom cleaning or laundry or floor swabbing or vacuuming. She later told me my grandmother never made her and her sisters do chores, because she wanted them to focus on school. Thus, Mom didn’t give us a boatload of stuff to do, just enough to learn to be responsible.
I would volunteer to dust. I liked dusting. Mom used a lemon-scented furniture polish. To this day, a room doesn’t smell clean to me unless it has a citrus scent. I loved clearing off the dust and making our table tops and the entertainment center shine. We also had a victrola that Mom and Dad bought with the house, and I loved polishing the wooden doors and the curved top.
I also liked getting an allowance. Mom and Dad said if we share in the household responsibility, we should share in the family income. I got a dollar a week by the time I hit my teens…but I didn’t get to collect it unless I had my account book. Dad set us up with little notebooks, where we had to mark the date and the amount, and he’d initial it each week. Kind of like putting in a time sheet for a paycheck.
Not all kids get allowances, but Investopedia says among parents who shell out a weekly allowance to their offspring, 59 percent say they require their kids to earn it. My ex and I tried doing the allowance thing for a while, but getting the kids to do chores didn’t work in their younger years, so we stopped doing it. I was working so many hours that I didn’t have time to nag. And eventually, the kids wound up getting jobs to earn income to buy stuff that they wanted that wasn’t given to them. But I would have preferred to get them into the earning-family-money habit.
So how much should you pay your kid for chores? Investopedia says most folks pay a dollar or two a week for every year of the child’s age. That’s about eighty bucks a month.
Now when my kids were in middle school, my ex tried to talk me into giving the kids eighty bucks a week, and make them pay for everything they needed besides room and board, saying it would make them responsible. Since neither of them were into feeding and caring for their dogs, cleaning their rooms or doing their laundry at that point, I did not think they’d exhibited enough responsibility for that kind of trust. And since I was, at that time, in charge of the checkbook, I did not think we had the financial resources to hand out that kind of cash.
You could always go the route of paying a kid per chore. RoosterMoney says the average amounts for top chores, rounded up, are $7.50 for mowing the lawn, $4.50 for raking leaves, $3.90 for washing the car, $3.10 for gardening, and $2.00 for washing windows. Oh yeah, Dad also had me wash windows.
Kids get an average of 30 bucks a week, according to MarketWatch. They also say roughly half of parents ae not giving their kids an allowance by age 8 – and they think that’s a mistake. Kids start to understand the concept of counting money at age 5, which is when they recommend you start the allowance system. This way kids better understand the value of saving and spending.
MarketWatch definitely advocates the saving part. My parents had us each set up a bank account when we were in high school to save our money. I was grateful to have one when I had my first paycheck at 16. Financial experts say getting your kids to save over time for items they want is a good habit. In fact, they recommend kids save a third of their allowance each week. The whole idea behind the allowance in the first place is to get kids used to the idea of being responsible for their money.
So, what happens if your kid wants to save up for an item that may take years to earn with their current allowance? MoneyFit suggests creating an optional chore list. If they add the chores to the list that they do – for example, shovel the driveway and not just the walk, or give the dog a bath and a trim – they get extra money. The optional chore also teaches them that earning money is tied to work, effort and initiative.
You don’t want the allowance to be so small that it’s meaningless, or so large that it’s just fun money. My parents eventually made us pay for special clothes, records, toys, art supplies, and books that we wanted to buy. My brother actually bought a fish tank with his, and several types of exotic fish…that eventually ate each other. Yes, that was a budget lesson for him. I saved up for a trip to Quebec with my French Club, and it was one of the best experiences I had in high school. Budget lesson for me.
And speaking of budget lessons, your kids are getting them from you. If you’re telling them they need to stick to their budget and earn the item they want, but you’re spending beyond what you can afford, your kids will do what you do and not what you tell them to do.
You might opt for the jar system with your kids, according to hermoney.com. There’s the “save” jar, the “spend” jar, and the “share” jar. Save for the future, spend for your weekly wants, and share with someone who needs it. It’s never to early to teach kids about giving to those less fortunate. But to make it effective, you need to give them more than 60 cents per week…which is what I got when I was six.
The idea is to give kids enough spending money that they have some purchasing power and room for decisions but they also develop a regular habit of saving and giving. Put it this way: now when you’re in line at the grocery store checkout and the kids start pleading for candy or gum, you tell them it’s their decision: do they want to spend their allowance on that? Oh yeah, my mom used that line a LOT when we were kids.
Each family operates differently. Maybe you have someone doing your yard work and cleaning, so the kids don’t have chores to do, and you don’t have time to fight with them over it. But you want to teach them to be responsible about money. So, maybe you give them a weekly allowance and tell them part of it goes toward clothes and meals out with friends as they get older. I used to save my babysitting money for a stop at McDonalds after our CYO basketball games. And some weeks I’d get the fries and other weeks I wouldn’t. All part of learning how to save and spend.
HerMoney says the benefit of starting an allowance when the kids are little is you’re teaching them base level stuff. Kind of like the way you expose them to literacy by reading to them before they can read.
It’s important to make them understand how to use money, and when NOT to use it. We’ve all heard from our kids at some point how EVERYBODY has the latest gadget or toy, and they absolutely need it, too. My ex and I used to tell them, “Wait til Christmas,” or “Wait til your birthday,” and it would land in their present pile. And they’d happily use it. For a month. If we made them buy it themselves, they’d have learned a lot sooner that not everything advertised is what it’s cracked up to be. They’d have learned that, yes, they can live without the latest trend. It would make spending money a lot less anxiety-inducing for them as adults.
My daughter was terrified about graduating, because she knew she’d have to figure out on her own how to manage her spending. Eventually she realized that she would be able to live on her salary, and over time save up for the extras she wanted. I really wish we had set up a consistent allowance for her to learn that sooner. It would have saved her a lot of dread and anxiety that many of today’s kids face. And it would have given her a lot more confidence as a consumer.