by Kelly Whalen
Chores and allowance didn’t always go together in our house, but we’ve recently made the switch to start tying together the chores the kids need to do and the allowance they want. Getting kids to do chores around the house can be challenging to say the least, so motivating them with their allowance is a win-win.
Creating a Chore System
By creating a chore chart/chore list for the kids it gives them freedom and independence to get things done without my constant nagging. I benefit by not having to keep all their to do items in my head (more space for my own enormous lists) and they learn how to manage on their own. If they don’t know what to do ‘next’ when prepping for school or bedtime, I just tell them to look at their list.
Tying Chores to Allowance
Teaching life skills like how to make a bed goes hand in hand with how to manage money. So we’ve made an adjustment in our house to use allowances to help the kids tie both skills together. While previously we used their allowance solely as a tool for teaching our kids money management, now their allowance is also tied to their work.
The kids each have a list of daily chores, school day chores (like doing homework), and weekly chores (like stripping their sheets to be washed). If they complete everything they get their allowance. I check on them on the weekend (they get paid on Sunday) and if there are things they haven’t done they can often still make up their work in time.
We recently made some tweaks to how they receive their allowance, and tying their allowance to chores has made an even bigger impact. It makes it easy to make sure they get done what they need to without micromanagement.
Printable Chore Chart
Below I’ve included a printable Excel Chore Chart. It’s free to download, and you can modify it to suit your family’s needs and chores.
DOWNLOAD CHORE CHART HERE
How do we Pay out Their Allowances?
You can read more about the tweaks we made in my New Year, New Allowance post. For the younger kids we can easily track their allowance via a simple notebook. We keep a log of their funds and pay once a week. We also do a monthly sweep into their savings accounts. A portion of their allowance goes to savings, and anything ‘leftover’ gets directed there as well.
For our oldest (who is a teen) his money is directly deposited onto a prepaid card to use at his convenience. Additionally we track a portion of his allowance to deposit into a monthly savings sweep as well. This allows us to track where his savings are easily, and help show him the importance of saving.
Using a prepaid card is extremely convenient for teens since they can use it almost anywhere, and with a card like the SpendSmart™ Prepaid MasterCard® you can set up alerts to inform you when your teen has used their card and so much more. Read more about the benefits here.
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