My husband (who's celebrating his birthday today!!) is an excellent financial manager.  This has proven important in our marriage since I’m partial to words, not math or anything remotely associated with budgets–he’s much better at crunching numbers and using software (i.e.,  TurboTax) than I am. Recently published on Simple Mom, Charlie’s excellent Warm and Fuzzy Budgeting post was preachin’ to his choir.

As is often the case in marriage, the way we were raised informs the way we parent.  For instance, I received a weekly allowance as a child but my husband didn’t.  It’s understandable, then, that when we had children of our own I was in favor of an allowance and Tad wasn’t.  After considering the pros and cons, we decided it wasn’t in keeping with our general parenting philosophy (perhaps another topic for another time), so we didn’t implement an allowance.

Last year, when our children were 12, 15 and 17, we had a change of heart.

With the goal of them learning how to handle money, we began paying them a bi-weekly allowance.

Our intent was not to compensate them for chores or link payment to behavior.   I’m excited to share how we arrived at the amount and the surprising results of instituting an allowance.

{Click to continue reading at Simple Mom how this worked for us…and where we might've fallen short.}