Host: Should allowances be tied to chores?
Janet Bodnar: Should allowances be tied to chores is probably one of the most controversial issues there is, as far as kids and money is concerned and it's controversial because some parents like the idea of paying for chores, paying for work they want to teach their kids it's value. Other parents say, no, no, no, I don't want to pay for things that they should be doing around the house anyway. So, I have come up with -- and there is also a third hitch in this that I have discovered again from years of writing about this subject and sometimes what I discovered is that parents liked the idea of timely allowance to chores, but then they can't manage the system and they forget whether the kids actually did the work. So do they get paid or don't they get paid. So the Janet Bodnar system is this, it's a little bit of both.
I think that the basic allowance should not be tied to actual chores that the kids do around the house. I am of the opinion that if they make up the mess they should clean it up and I shouldn't have to pay them for it; but I do believe that the allowance should be tied to financial chores. They should have certain financial jobs, financial responsibilities that come with that allowance. So it's not a freebie. It's not extra money, on top of everything else you already buy for them. You actually give them certain financial responsibilities with that money and then above the base allowance you can pay them on a chore by chore basis, so they can earn additional money, extra money and it's easy for you to manage the system like that because you are only paying for one chore at a time, plus they can make extra money if they want to spend extra money on top of the base allowance.
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