Host: What is the right amount of allowance to give my children?
Janet Bodnar: There is no really one right amount of allowance to give your child. Obviously, this is going to vary from a family to family; it's going to vary from depending on where you live and what the cost of living is; what do you expect the kids to do with the allowance, but I will give you some guidelines. Some people recommend, for example, the kids get a weekly allowance equal to their age. Now, what I find from years of talking to parents about this is that they are little bit reluctant to do that with younger kids. They are not sure they want their six-year-old to get six dollars a week. That just sounds like a lot of money for them. What survey show and surveys on this are a little squishy, because people define allowance differently, show that middle school kids get roughly six to eight, maybe ten dollars a week allowance and allowance usually tops out at about $20 a week for teenagers because by that time they have jobs of their own, so parents don't feel like they have to subsidizing with the allowance.
Now, my own personal guideline, the Janet Bodnar guideline is, I think you should start with an allowance, a weekly allowance, that's equal to half a child's age. Now, parents feel much more comfortable with this as far as younger kids are concerned. So the idea of giving a six-year-old three dollars a week or a seven-year-old three fifty a week make sense to them and then again, as the kids get older and their responsibilities get more, you can bump up the amount of that allowance.
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