My 7-year-old daughter discovered the connection between work and money this weekend and she went all in finding things she could get paid to do.
We’re a family that talks openly about our finances. Our kids know how much our house is worth – as if Zillow doesn’t tell everyone anyway – and how much our cars cost (and why we’re perfectly content to have both of them paid off).
We talk about the decisions we make when it comes to spending on things we need and things we want.
And more than anything we do our best to connect labor and earning with the financial decisions we make.
What she can earn money for doing is different from what she and her sisters are expected to do around the house. They have obligations, just as my wife and I do, to do things around the house – feeding dogs and picking up after them, putting their clothes away, cleaning their room, etc. They don’t get paid to do that.
Their allowance – $1 for each year, so the 7-year-old gets $7 a week – is meant to teach them how to save, spend and be charitable with their money. This wasn’t my idea. This came directly from my friend Ron Lieber and his excellent kids and money book, The Opposite of Spoiled. I also got help from Susan Beacham, who created The Money Savvy Pig, a super-visual way to divide up the money you get into different uses.
But earning money, that was the spark that went off this weekend.
What drove it? A doll she wanted that we weren’t going to buy.
But once she started earning, she didn’t want to stop.
After making her own bed – no money for that – she made our bed, smoothing out the duvet and putting all the pillows in order. She earned $3.
She washed a bunch of water bottles that I didn’t want to wash and earned $2.
She negotiated with her middle sister to make her bed and now that sister is paying her $6 of her own money for the week.
She even cleaned up the doll room, which was a true mess that we had ignored by closing the door. That earned her $10. (Now, technically she should have done the last one for free as part of being a member of the family, but none of us wanted to do it and we’d all let it get a bit out of hand.)
What did she learn? She learned the connection between working and earning, for sure. But she also learned to negotiate and stand her ground. If the price wasn’t right, she held out until we came up. She also learned the opposite: that sometimes people talk you down, as when she asked for $20 to make our bed!
Best of all for me: she was self-motivated. We weren’t giving her tasks to do; she was finding them and coming to use with her offer.
How do you talk to your kids about earning money?
