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Elementary School-Aged Kids
How much allowance do you give your first grader?
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Anonymous
This is not interest, this is usury. if this were sub-prime lending there would be an outcry, but because it is a child's piggy-bank this interest rate is somehow "OK". |
Anonymous
But PP is giving this interest rate to DC, not charging DC this rate to borrow the money. Isn't this more along the lines of something Bernie Madoff might promise but here there is no ponzi scheme and the parents are actually good for it? |
Anonymous
| Banks are giving 1.7% a year for savings. I'd like to put my money in a 1% a week bank. Pp, are you looking to adopt an older child? |
Anonymous
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$6 a week. $3 goes into spend, $1 into save, $1 into invest, and $1 into donate.
Her spend is stuff like, junk toys, ice cream during the summer, gum (she loves gum), cheap makeup and nail polish, etc. She also saved a bunch of money for a big ticket item a couple of months ago.... |
Anonymous
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OP here. Thanks very much for all the responses/ideas! |
Anonymous
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We recently started an allowance of sorts for our DS, who is in K. Each $ is directly tied to various goals, which DS has to repeat a certain # of times in order to earn.
Sample goals: read a book (pre-reader), ride your bike with no training wheels between two cones, swim five freestyle strokes, try a new food, etc. He helped come up with some of them. We try to make them things that he can do, but that push his comfort zone. DS has no restrictions on how he spends the money, and hasn't spent any, since it was so hard to get! But I like the idea of splitting it into save, invest, donate categories in due course. |
Anonymous
| Wow. 23:57 sounds kinda harsh to me. I've heard of making kids do chores to get their allowance, but not to perform. |
Anonymous
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My K student gets $1.50 per week. She can have .50 for spending, .50 for saving, and .50 goes to charity.
At Christmas we'll take the charity money and buy something for toys for tots or something else (wherever her charitable interests lie). She is required to make her bed each day, keep her floor clear of toys and clothes, and occasional other small chores to earn her allowance. So far, so good. |
Anonymous
16:27 here, correcting my original post which said $2/week - my fourth-grader gets $2/week, not $3/week, though at this point, as I said above, he is collecting more than that because of having earned interest. RE usury, I am wondering what the heck you are talking about since we are not lending money, only serving as an in-home bank for the kids' savings. We keep their debits and credits in a ledger book entitled "The Bank of Mom & Dad" so most of what they have is on paper. They can choose to take the cash, but in that case they and not we have it, and consequently they earn no interest. They also "bank" money with us they earn from neighborhood jobs (e.g. pet-sitting). The reason we give so much interest is that its purpose is to show them how money can grow if you delay gratification and save it. If we gave them real-world interest on their small allowances, the concept would not come across as strongly as we want it to. I can't take credit for this idea; we got it from a book called The Bank of Mom & Dad, which we really like. To the PP asking about peer pressure, no, to my knowledge my kids don't experience that. We give them an allowance because we want them to have (and they want to have) money to spend as they please. They are now 12 and 9 and in general have pretty good judgment about making purchases - it took a few bad toy purchases for it to sink it, but it really seems to have gotten across. They rarely buy books now, because they have figured out that they can read what they want from the library, and save that money for stuff they cannot borrow. |
Anonymous
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16:27 back to add a few things:
1. We don't make them save, spend, or donate, because the point of the 1%/week system is to give them some room to exercise judgment. Interestingly (to me), they do save, spend and donate, with no guidance from us. In fact, when my fourth-grader began earning more money thanks to interest earnings, he spontaneously and without any input at all from us decided to double his contribution to a church-related charity. 2. They have household chores they must do, which are not tied to their allowances. We occasionally have a big project (e.g. cleaning out the garage) they can help with if they wish in which case we agree on a price and pay them to help. In those cases we make it clear that the help has to be worth the money we spend on it - no slacking off, no pretending to work. |
Anonymous
Yes, that's right. The point isn't for kids to experience what real-life interest rates are; it is to demonstrate how compound interest works in a way that has short-term meaning for and a beneficial impact on them. |
Anonymous
23:57 here. Not sure what you mean by harsh. I didn't say "perform" - you did. Locking our DS in a dungeon would be harsh. Making him go to bed without supper every night would be harsh. But, giving a monetary reward for accomplishing things that he already wants to learn to do? Not sure I understand you comment at all. FWIW, DS has been doing "chores" - picking up toys, helping to sort laundry and emptying the dishwasher. Those things are part of being part of a family. They are expected and he does them without comment. |
Anonymous
| We don't give allowances. |
Anonymous
| We give allowance to our Kindergartener to start the process of him thinking about the value of things he wants. He is currently saving for a Star Wars legos toy he really, really wants - and its around $30, so he's been saving for awhile. He gets $3 (1/2 his age) a week, and he MUST put aside some portion - he chooses, into charity. He can choose to set aside some into a long-term piggy, and eventually, we will give him interest on long-term piggy, but we feel the concept may be a bit beyond his ken right now. Usually he puts anywhere from a quarter to a dollar into charity - that piggy is pretty full, and he's going to have to figure out where to donate it, with our help, around holiday time. |
Anonymous
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Boy: I am cheap. Ten year old gets 50 cents a week. He saves much of it and can earn more for chores. Buys his own stuff with that and his birthday money. Last thing he bought was some Gormiti toys. I give him Yugioh cards for reading.
He doesn't seem to need much. After reading this, I think I will reconsider, but he hasn't asked for anything. |