Family Contributions

As I mentioned in the post on Monday, once the kids were interested in money, we started family contributions. Family contributions are things you are expected to do as part of the family. They don't earn you money or rewards, but they will earn you a smiley face. For our two year olds, we have make bed, push in chairs, help with laundry, clean up toys, make good choices, take out garbage, child's choice, and mom/dad choice. If you have toys in multiple rooms, you might want to list them separately. We include putting away their plates with pushing in chairs because it is all done at the same time. Other ideas could include watering plants, feeding animals, getting dressed, and anything else you can think of.

 Once they have completed all of their family contributions for the day, they have the option of doing jobs to make money. These are things they are still learning, need more supervision, or don't need to be done daily.  Ours include vacuuming, cleaning mirrors, cleaning windows, dusting, watering the grass, sweeping the floor, moping the floor, and mom/dad choice. You could also include cooking, or any of the things above. Since we are working on money starting with coins, each job pays 5 cents (paid in pennies) and pay day is on Friday. We started by marking who did each job by color. However, as you can see in the picture, the green marker exploded, so now we just write the first letter of their name on the job.

As they get older and can do more, we will introduce new jobs. We can move the already masters jobs to the family contributions chart and take things off the family contribution chart that should already be a habit and not need to be reminded or rewarded. For example, my kids fully dress themselves without being told, so that isn't on any chart. They are almost at the point of not needing a reminder about pushing in their chairs and cleaning up their dishes, so that will be removed next. They are awesome at dusting and no longer need supervision to do a good job, so that will be moved onto the family contribution chart and we can add another job.

Pay days are exciting. I couldn't find the type of bank I wanted, so I created one. I found a 4 part divided container at The Container Store and I put sticker letters on each section. We have save, spend, invest, and donate. Once I pay out their pennies, they place them one at a time in each section, in order. So the save always gets the most and the donate always gets the fewest. After their money has been sorted, they take the money out of one section at a time. They start by counting pennies. If they have 5, then they trade them for a nickle and so on. This works on one to one correspondence, counting, and of course money.

The save is a long term savings. Once they get at least $5 in it, they will open their own savings account. The spend is the immediate, fun money. If they ever say they want to buy something, this is where that would come from. They will be introduced to this idea once they have just over $1. We will take them to one of the dollar stores and let them buy whatever they want. If they want a toy later, we will cut out a photo and price of the toy to place in the spend section so they can see it and remember what they are saving for. The invest is a little more tricky. We want the kids to know that you can either work to make money or make wise investments to make money. Once they have $5, we will let them start with micro-investing. There are many ways to do this, but most require $25. We figure if they can save $5, we can throw in the other $20. They will get their money plus the interest back and we will only get the $20 back. This way they see it grow faster and it helps them to understand. The donate is self explanatory. They will get to choose the charity and how often they donate money.

It has worked out that after 2 months, the save has just over 30% of the money and the donate has around 23% with the spend and invest coming in around 23/24%. I'm sure you could figure out a way to make it come out differently, but this works for us. It doesn't matter how much they earn, each section always gets at least one penny and it's very easy for a toddler to understand.