I don’t know if you have kids or not, but one of the more difficult things to keep track of, at least for me, is their allowance. Yeah, you might say, just write it down on a piece of paper or something. While that may seem to have merit, it rarely works out in my family. Let’s say my son gets $5 every two weeks for allowance. That’s a $5 bill I need to have each and every week.
Honestly? It never works out that way. So we tried using a calendar, on which I created a repeating event, set for every two weeks, figuring we could just count it up when he needed something. Well, that didn’t really work out, either. We’d be at a store, and he’d want something, and it’d be some non-multiple of five, and we’d try to remember to write it down, and so on.
Suffice it to say that I am doing a poor job at helping my kid keep track of his allowance, and an equally poor job of prepping him for real life money management.
So imagine my joy when I saw Allowance Manager for iOS, a Universal app that basically does what we need: tracks allowance on the iPhone or iPad. Win!
Created by a father, Dan Meader, with a similar issue, Allowance Manager lets kids and parents work together to keep track of what each child has been given for allowance, as well as any extra gift cash for birthdays or holidays. It also syncs up to the Allowance Manager website, for some seriously cloud-based money management for the whole darn family.
“Just log into our secure AllowanceManager.com website or open up our iPhone / iPad app and just a few minutes a week, parents can set and track their children’s allowance,” said Meader, in a statement. “It really makes it easy for parents to track and remember what money they’re giving their kids while empowering their kids to learn the value of money – why not get a computer to do most of the work for you?”
I can’t wait to get this into my own kids’ hands, as they move from dependent little ones to more and more independent pre-teens and teenagers. The more I can help them manage their own money now, the better off they’ll be in the future when they have to do it for real.
“We want to help make managing your family allowance simple and fun,” said Meader, “while at the same time helping kids learn how to correctly use money. The problem is learning how to be good with money is a skill that can only be done with practice. You cannot learn to ski by reading a book on skiing.”
True enough, I think, to warrant trying out this free app right now.
Source: App Store
