🔗tl;dr

However you manage your kids' allowance, whatever mix of chores or other responsibilities you incorporate, you'll need some way of tracking their money. Consider an approach that leaves the technology of the last 100 years out of it.

🔗Stumbling into an allowance system

When Madeline and I started giving the kids an allowance of $5/week, we did it using a virtual account system of our own devising. Without having done a lot of upfront planning on this part of the allowance scheme, we reached for Apple Notes because it was the path of least resistance. It allowed both of us to check the kids' current balance, make edits on the go as the kids made purchases, and made giving them their allowance as easy as adding a line item to a shared Apple Note.

🔗A Spreadsheet?

Surprising no one, Apple Notes is not a good spreadsheet application. Interacting with it mostly on our iPhones, it quickly became tedious. I don't mind tedium if it's in the service of something I value, but there wasn't really anything gained via this particular tedium. We then switched to Google Sheets after a month or two on Apple Notes. An automatic balance column! All the glory of a spreadsheet! We had achieved Less Tedium! Here it stayed for quite a while, but I still didn't like it.

🔗But what if we add more tech?

Managing an allowance spreadsheet is still tedious. When it's time to add allowance, I'd copy and paste a previous entry and adjust the date, but oops now the formula for the balance column is pointing to the wrong cells and needs adjusting. Oh look the kids both spent money on something but we made the purchase in a single transaction. Time to reverse engineer the tax rate for Alameda so I can split the transaction correctly (I'm not OCD you're OCD).

I fantasized about scanning the receipts and logging the spending using a nice, easy to use app. Hell, using Google Sheets for this purpose even made me view Expensify with jealousy. EXPENSIFY, FFS. Perhaps I could build such a fantasy app? I had been building (and continue to build) a webapp for tracking Madeline's and my spending, so why not something similar for the kids?! Maybe I'd build it in Flutter and have the ability to add and edit transactions with automatic allowance entry on a configurable day of the week and shared accounts so Madeline and I could both edit it and then the kids could have a read-only view that they could see on their iPads if they wanted to check their balance and …

🔗Stepping back from the ledge

I was two hours into the vibe coding session for that Flutter-based app when I looked at myself in the mirror and said "WTF are you doing?". So I deleted the app and decided that building more tech myself was not the answer. By this point, I'd had a good amount of time to think about this problem and figure out my goals.

A good allowance system:

  1. Teaches the kids about saving and spending responsibly.
  2. … maybe that's it?

The key part of that was not really the "saving and spending" part but the "teaches the kids" part. No version of the system up to that point had done anything to try to teach the kids much of anything. They simply asked us how much money they had whenever they wanted something at a shop. There was no real thought about saving or planning (granted, they're 10 and 7 so that may not be entirely the allowance system's fault).

I thought about what my friends and I had as kids (not an app, obviously). I remembered seeing Madeline's friend Jocelyn using a big chalkboard in their kitchen with the kids' current balances written on it. I considered lots of possible choices, but in the end I came up with two approaches that I thought would work, and offered both to the kids:

  1. Mom & I hand you $5/week in cash and you manage it how you like. If you want to spend money at a shop you need to remember to bring it with you.
  2. We stop tracking spending on mom's and my phones and start tracking it in your own paper ledgers.

🔗Paper is a technology, too

After some discussion, they both went with paper ledgers. I bought a couple of cheap 50ish page notebooks for them and introduced them to the concept of a ledger. We're about two weeks in and so far so good. This way, they even get to decorate them to really own the experience of managing their money & allowance.

Paper ledger
Decorated cover of a paper allowance ledger.

Now, if they want to know how much money they have in their account they just go look it up themselves. If they buy something, they take the receipt home and add an entry to the ledger themselves. For the moment, this requires help from me or Madeline, and it's a little tedious. But it's tedium in service of learning. They're doing math! They're (maybe) learning how to responsibly spend money! They're learning how to spreadsheet! That warms my nerd heart much more than using Flutter to make an app four people (or two, realistically) will ever use.

🔗The future?

This scheme won't last forever, and probably won't even survive the next few years in my 10 year old's case. Eventually she'll go to the shops on her own and spend money herself. Maybe we end up with a little bit of both #1 and #2 from above, or maybe we get her a smart watch she can use to tap to pay. Assuming nothing falls down with the paper ledger, we'll reevaluate that in a couple years.