In my ongoing effort to keep advisers abreast of ways to engage the next generation, I came across an entertaining website for you to share with parents or grandparents who can in turn share with their young ones.
Allowance Manager is a free online tool to help kids (and parents for that matter) begin their lifetime wrestling match with money management and was founded by former software engineers and managers from Apple Inc. and Adobe Systems Inc.
The developers' idea is that with today's increasingly busy families we often forget about how useful it can be to give kids an allowance and perhaps more importantly follow through with it on a regular basis (like the kids would forget to remind us!).
Basically the site keeps track of it for you and your offspring since it automatically credits regular payments to an online allowance account and lets parents log expenditures.
“The last time I had a conversation with my nine and ten year old boys about how much allowance I owed them, I knew it was time to create a tool to track allowances online,” Dan Meader, founder of Allowance Manager said in a statement.
“Now when we want to know how much the kids have, we just consult the nearest computer or mobile device. Enabling the boys to see a history of deposits and expenditures is helping them learn how to effectively manage their money,” he continued.
With Allowance Manager you can:
• Reward good behavior
• Record extra income
• Record monetary gifts
• Discourage misbehavior
• Record investments
• Record donations
• Record purchases
• Print chore charts
(see the screenshot for a fleshed out idea of usage)
I shot back some questions after receiving the release and setting up an account myself.
First, I asked what was coming next after version 1.0?
Answers provided in e-mail from Dan Meader (edited a bit for the sake of brevity): “…we have new features and functionality that we will be rolling out over the next year. For example, while a user can already easily take advantage of Allowance Manager through the web browser on any mobile device, we plan to release native mobile applications for users who prefer that experience. Other plans are being kept under wraps…For the moment, we are content to provide the service free of charge without consideration of potential sponsors or advertisers. Our goal is to provide a clean, easy to use tool for managing allowances, and that is what we think and hope we have accomplished.
Q What is the purpose of the rotating corp. logos in the lower right corner? Are these advertisers? They are not active links.
A We associate four verbs with what the kids can do with their money: Save, Invest, Spend, Donate. When a child logs in to his or her account and clicks one of the four links: Save, Invest, Spend, Donate, we suggest that they consider opening an account with the organizations represented by the logos in the lower right hand corner.
Q I have not had the time to scour through them yet but don't any of the big banks or brokerages offer something like this? Surely some of the personal finance management applications from these institutions have something like this? I looked through Mint.com for example but did not see anything.
A As far as we know, none of the banks PFM apps or Mint have an allowance manager component. We believe that our service complements their offerings very well.
Q (Okay really more of a statement I wanted a reaction to) I personally like this being simple and unaffiliated with any big corporate sponsor or advertiser but it is not much of a business model at present ;-)
A Thank you, Davis. We like it too. For now, we are content to provide the service free of charge to provide parents and children the best user experience possible. Our hope is that parents will share their experience with other parents making Allowance Manager a successful tool in everyday life.
For more information visit
Allowance Manager online.
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