Why Write an Allowance App? The Origin Story

A friend of mine told me about the book The Opposite of Spoiled by Ron Lieber several years ago. My wife and I both agreed with the concepts in the book — especially me, an only child who grew up closer to spoiled than not. My personal understanding and value of money management didn’t really develop until late high school after I started working at a restaurant for minimum wage. Without that experience, I don’t know where I would be today.

Jars, Paper, and an App

We decided to start giving our kids an allowance when they were 5 and 7. We started with actual jars and cash, thinking it was important for the kids to “see the money,” but our kids — unlike us when we were kids — didn’t have any interest in touching and counting physical money.

Switching out ones for fives and then for tens and twenties, and never having enough quarters soon became too much of a chore for us, so we tried switching to paper tracking. That still didn’t solve remembering to “do allowance” on allowance day, and soon I was in search of an app.

Losing the Intent

Nothing I found followed the Save/Spend/Give model that we had been practicing, so I ended up settling for one that just had one account per kid. This worked fine for “Spend” purchases, but it wasn’t really possible to track saving or giving in the same way. We felt that was a real miss — this didn’t really teach or reinforce any of the habits we had originally set out to do. Also, one of our favorite and most meaningful allowance rituals had been letting the kids pick a charity once a quarter to donate to.

Hence Budgette

We’re starting with Budgets (jars) that families can configure and a Child View to allow kids to see how much they’ve saved and spent on their own devices. We have plans for more tools to help both parents and kids understand their spending and plan their saving.

We hope you find the app useful in helping you instill good financial habits in your kids.

Thanks!