Our smart money kids adventure! (Part 2 – the 50 minute Dollar Store Edition)

So here we are a week into our Smart Money Kids Adventure. (Go read part 1, if you missed it!) Dave Ramsey has been pretty influential in our lives. I even got to be in a live video chat with him and his daughter last week. That was a blast!

Meanwhile, on the home front, the girls are doing fantastic!

The jobs for my oldest (age 7) are, by her choosing:

Clean her bedroom. (She has as separate checklist for this hanging in her room.)

Sweep the floor.

Clean the guest bathroom.

Empty small trashcans.

Set the table.

The jobs for my youngest (age 4) are, by her choosing:

Clean her bedroom. (The girls share a room, so they share the checklist I mentioned above.)

Wash the dishes. (This is definitely a tag team event between the two of us – but it’s her favorite. And she’s starting to get really good at it!)

Dust.

Sort the clean sliver ware out of the dishwasher.

I used this job chart and printed it twice, slid it into a plastic sleeve protector and they put stickers up for each job they complete. They know that every five stickers = $1.00 earned.

Saturday evenings are paydays. They love Saturdays.

For both of them for now, we put their money in a glass Mason jar and let it pile up. Dave Ramsey said he’d crumple up those dollar bills and let them look really big in that jar to really get his kids excited. Our girls definitely get excited! For now, we are just implementing a glorified piggy bank with the jars. In a few weeks, we’ll start sharing with our oldest about the concepts of saving, spending, and giving away her money. She’s good at all three of these things, so giving them a title will be more of an art project opportunity than an actual learning lesson.

Funny Story – Kami spends her first earned dollar.

So, my five year old and I headed into a nearby dollar store to spend her first dollar. She spent almost 25 minutes walking up and down every aisle wanting to pick something for her sister. This was serious business, folks.

Then, when she had gone through the entire store, she decided that in fact, she wanted to buy something for herself. So she needed to look through everything again. Of course. She’ll be a blast at the mall in a few years.

She finally settled on some My Little Pony look alikes – there were two in a package so it was a perfect share-with-sis sorta buy.

She walked up to the counter to buy them. She couldn’t even see over the counter. But she held her dollar up in the air for the cashier to take. The cashier said, “Thank you!” in such a sweet voice – Kami responded, “Oh, Ma’am! You are having a really good attitude today!”

Which made everyone in line behind us laugh. And she laughed too.

The joy she got from spending her own earned money was fun to watch. And I saw the connection between working for something and having the freedom to spend it start to form in her little mind.

This is what works for us – not necessarily what may work for you! This job list I found helped me determine what jobs were appropriate for what ages generally speaking.

Meanwhile – you only have a few days left to preorder Dave Ramsey’s new book, Smart Money, Smart Kids! (You can download the first two chapters for free here!) You’ll be so glad you did!