Wrong.
I wonder sometimes how Ellie is going to get a grasp on the concept of money. When I was growing up, my mom would pay for everything with cash. If not cash, then she would use a check book. Either way, I would witness the exchange of a piece of paper for all sorts of goodies. I saw that in order to buy these toys or groceries, my mom had to give up a piece of paper or two.
What is Ellie going to think? We rarely use cash. It's annoying to deal with cash and check books are not much better. That leaves credit cards, which means when Ellie sees us buying something, she sees that we get the cool stuff AND we get the plastic card back. Therefore we didn't give up anything for the stuff.
It should be interesting to see how that pans out in the future.
6 comments:
It seems like many of the comments that I give to you are of the form, "Well... *I* do it this way." I'm about to do that again, but I hope that it's not perceived as "advice". It's just meant to tell you how I do it and how it works out. Do it the same way. Do it a different way. My only goal is to share experiences.
Anyway....I started writing the comment and then realized it was really, really long. So I blogged about it instead. Here's the link:
http://dullgeek.blogspot.com/2008/09/my-two-cents.html
I LOVE your ideas, especially the one where they help you pay the bills!
The allowance is something my mom used to do as well. We could buy whatever piece of $#!+ toy we wanted as long as we had the money to pay for it. However, she added a small twist to it... Instead of giving us cash, we each had one of those check book register things. We would keep track of how much money mom owed us and could cash in on it whenever we wanted. That way, there was the additional check book skills involved.
I've never heard of the idea of giving a lump dollar amount for the birthday, but it might be something we'll consider. It makes sense to me. I'll have to run it by my husband.
Re: the birthday money:
a) We didn't do it until they'd already had several standard birthday celebrations.
b) It gives the older kids an opportunity to plan a larger budget than they're used to. But along with that, we make sure that they pay for 100% of every expense that goes into the event. Actually, now that I think about it, we leave out gas going to and from the stores. It's not been a problem, but if their planning skills started getting to the point where they had a lot of "I have to go back because I forgot something" then we'd probably start charging them $1 per trip.
I talked to my husband about this and he actually really liked all your ideas as well. Thanks for sharing!
This might also be of use to you:
http://www.blogher.com/giving-your-kids-hands-experience-money
thanks! That was useful!
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