Teaching kids money management

My boys are 7, 5 and 5 – so we are right there with you 🙂 I don’t know about yours, but mine still don’t have a good concept of the value of money, even the 7yo who is pretty advanced in his math skills. They get birthday money from the granparents and really don’t value $20 over $3. We have the Dave Ramsey kids products. I have not used the “curriculum” with them yet, but I do like the storybooks and I think reading those is in the vein of a CM approach. One thing we “do” is that our boys get “chips” (bingo chips) for their chores and they can “spend” them for watching a show or playing iPad games. They have to save these up to have enough to “buy” thier tickets (we put a value to the chips – 15 minutes). So even though this is not real money, it is the same principle. 

We paid allowance for a couple of years and the kids used a piggy bank with 4 compartments (giving, saving, investing, spending) that I found online. Each kid received 50 cents per year of age per week. Dd11 got $5.50 and ds8 $4. We just gave dd5 $1. Each week (actually each month at our house) when paid, the kids would put a % into each compartment. It worked very well to teach them to manage money. They had to buy items they wanted – drinks at a restaurant, candy, toys, etc. the savings was for their short term wants like a bigger toy, etc.

Now that they’ve gotten the concept of money and how to manage it fairly well, we are switching to a hybrid system of chores. All chores are expected, but we’re willing to pay for some. To earn the $ for the paid chores of the day, the unpaid ones must be complete, too. They have the opportunity to earn several dollars per week. For our older two kids, we’re paying 50 cents per chore and $2 per room cleaned top to bottom. The 5 yo earns 25 cents per chore and th 2 yo is just learning. We may tweak the system and adjust the payment amounts, but it’s a good start to a new phase of the system for us.

Christie