The Change Jar

If you have kids and they either go to a school building other than your home or have activities they go to, then you probably have an annoying problem.

It is the endless requests for teeny, tiny amounts of money.  The fifty cents for popcorn day, the seventy five cents for the vending machine at dance, or the change to spend at the school store.

I find this annoying on a couple of levels.  The first is that to put this in your budget is tedious.  The second is if you don't, it gets away from you fast.  Any time you have a petty cash situation, you pretty much are blindly spending.  When you are blind that almost aways equates to spending way more than you think you are.

The way most parents hande this is they hand over dollar bills.  I don't like to do that because I don't trust my kids to get the change back to me, and I don't trust whichever fourth grader is volunteering at the cash register to make correct change.

At this point some of you are thinking, "who cares it is a dollar?"

This is when I want to reach through the internet and shake you and say "WAKE UP this is why you don't understand why you seem to be burning through money.  Your kids are dropping it all over the sidewalk!"  It adds up people.  If you give your child a dollar a week for whatever, and they spend half and lose the other half, that is $26.00 a year.  I can feed my family dinner for almost a week on that, and we all know you are giving your kids way more than that a week.

This is what we do instead.  We have a change jar next to where our keys are.  We have a drawer in the bathroom near the hamper.  Whatever change we find, in our pockets, on the ground, in the car, dropped around the house, we put in these two locations.  We take change out of the jar to pay for this stuff.  We give them exact change.  This teaches them how to count change and also how to be responsible for money, because if they lose it, then they won't have enough to get their stuff.  If they decide they want to save it, they have to be careful, because if I find it anywhere besides their bag then I put it back in the jar.  Problem solved.

By the way, this same technique works for adults who want to get stuff out of vending machines or pay for parking meters, etc.