Selfish Mom

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In this morning’s video blog I mentioned something that Pasta Boy was filmed for.  Well, it went online yesterday, on MSN.com and is really cute.  I’m in there too - not as cute, but Pasta Boy is adorable.  It’s about kids and money, something that we’re still trying to get a handle on.  Pasta Boy and Munchkin both get an allowance equal to their ages, and there are certain things that they have to spend their own money on.  For example, they each get to have dessert every day, usually as an after school snack.  If they want to have it at home they can, for free.  I explained to them how much cheaper it is to get a half gallon of ice cream at the store and some cones, as opposed to getting one cone at a time.  So if they want to go to the ice cream truck outside of school, I’ll only subsidize their purchases by fifty cents, and then they have to pay for the rest.  When Jake was five, getting five dollars a week, he wanted to get a $3 double cone every time.  He quickly figured out that only two of those meant that his money was gone for the week, and he couldn’t buy ice cream the other five days or save up for anything else.

I try not to tell them what they can and can’t buy with their money, but I will try to talk them out of something if I think it’s a stupid use of their money.  Pasta Boy is saving up for a really expensive drum set right now, and when he’s in a store and wants to buy something, mentioning the drum set almost always gets him to put the item back.

Despite what the article seems to be saying, Jake doesn’t have to do things around the house to get his allowance.  He does have chores that he has to do, but they’re not tied to his allowance.  We do, however, fine the kids for certain things.  These are things that they do over and over again, like Munchkin was having a really really hard time remembering to flush the toilet.  After about a week of reminding her we started fining her a quarter every time she forgot.  Since then she’s only had to give us one quarter.

Doing the interview with MSN was a lot of fun.  We did it in Pasta Boy’s bedroom, and The Ass and I were in the hallway cracking up at his answers.  I didn’t realize that they wanted to interview me as well, but I’m a total attention whore so that was just fine by me.  Thank goodness they didn’t show some of my more embarassing moments.  It was hard talking about my (terrible) spending habits with my husband standing right there!

Anyway, the interview is here. And Pasta Boy’s walls are only purple because that’s not his real room, it’s his sister’s (when the renovation is over we all shift bedrooms).

And here’s an interesting article about kids and money. I love this article, because we’re already doing practically everything they talk about, and I love being right.

Originally posted on Selfish Mom

Tags: allowance, MSN