Did You Decide to Give Your Child an Allowance?

What did you decide about the allowance?
—Anonymous

My recent post on wether I should give my child an allowance garnered a huge amount of response and advice, much of which was so thoughtful and great. Before I tell you what we did, let me pass along two pieces of that advice. First, tons of people recommended the book The Opposite of Spoiled, which I have now read and is excellent. Second, many people suggested the app RoosterMoney if you want a way to keep track of things.

Here is how it went down in our house. I sent Jesse a bullet-point version of the newsletter and we had a brief discussion and decided, yes, it was a good idea. The kids now each get $3 a week, of which a percentage not less than 10% must be allocated to charity for end-of-year donation. Their funds are recorded in a Google Sheet that is shared with them (though they do not have edit access, haha), and purchases must be approved by me.

There you go! So far no one has bought anything, but we did get some good math calculations out of it.