Organizing Kids’ Pay Day & Bank System

Guest post from Mystie Winckler

We pay our children for select assigned chores (not all), but I have always struggled with keeping coins and cash on hand, with having places for the multiple containers (savings, spending, tithe – times 3, and someday times 5!), and with keeping the children from just playing with and losing their spending money.

I finally got fed up enough to find the fix, without splurging on special set-ups like Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Junior set.

The back-to-school display was my inspiration!

Supplies

1 3-ring binder
1 binder organizer with multiple zippered pockets
1 binder pencil pouch per child
1 pencil pouch that fits inside the binder pouch per child
1 small coin purse per child
1 roll of dimes & quarters and 5 1-dollar bills, or whatever amounts you need for your family.

Set-Up

The coin purse is for spending money, the smaller pencil pouch is for savings, and both go inside the binder pencil pouch, which is inserted into the 3-ring binder. You’ll have as many of these pouches as you have children on the payroll.

The binder organizer pouch is for storing the coins and cash.

System

As money is earned (from extra jobs or doing work for grandparents or neighbors), it is deposited for safe-keeping into the child’s binder pouch. This has significantly cut down on the number of quarters going through my washing machine!

Saturday is pay day for chores at our house, so I pull the binder off the shelf and sit down with one child at a time. We pull out any coins earned during the week and then I hand them their weekly pay. They take some off the top for offering at church (at least 10%, but we round up based on the coins they have), then split the remainder between spending and saving. If it’s an odd number of quarters, we don’t make change, I just let them decide which category gets the extra. The spending money goes into the coin purse and the savings into the pencil pouch and all of it goes back into their binder pouch, safe and secure.

The offering money goes up high on the bookshelf in a stack and my husband puts it all in his pocket Sunday morning to hand out at the appropriate time during the service. Not only do we want our kids to learn that you get money by working, but we also wanted them to be able to give their own earned money on Sunday mornings rather than just be carriers of our offerings.

Now I also don’t need to scrounge for dimes and quarters weekly, because I started with the roll. When I start to run low, I use the cash and buy out coins from the savings and spending pouches. This keeps them from getting heavy and unwieldy, also.

It’s been a convenient set up for us that keeps everything all together and easy to grab, helping me not procrastinate pay days and them not losing their money.