This past weekend, I had an interesting interaction with our six year old. For background, we’ve been extremely busy lately and had gotten behind on their allowance. So when we finally sat down to get caught up, he was absolutely thrilled to find that he finally had enough money to buy the Nintendo DS game that he’s been craving — Pokemon Diamond. [more]

As of yesterday, my wife and I have been married for ten years. This got me to thinking about all of the things we’ve experienced together during that time. I actually started this list over on raising4boys.com, but thought that I’d flesh it out here. We’ve been married for:

10 years
9 surgeries (4 C-sections, 2 carpal tunnel, 2 sets of wisdom teeth, and a tonsillectomy)
8 trips to Disney World
7 car trips of more than 2000 miles
6 ear tubes (two of our kids, three sets total)
5 moves (fortunately three of these were local)
4 kids
3 states of residence (one of them twice!)
2 homes bought
1 home sold

And a partridge in a pear tree… We’ve had a very busy (and very, very good) ten years!

Every year my parents give our kids a variety of Christmas gifts including money for their bank accounts, some clothes, and a toy of some sort. But this year they decided to forego the latter, and give the kids gift cards instead, such that they could pick out their own fun stuff. Out of curiosity, I asked our kids what sort of gift card they’d like to have if they were to (hypothetically) receive one as a Christmas gift. I was expecting answers along the lines of Toys’R'Us, Target or Wal-Mart. [more]

Happiness is having a video-capable cellphone in your pocket when your three and five year old sons discover a rack of auto-inflating Whoopie Cushions in the toy aisle at Walgreens. The beauty of these ‘next-generation’ Whoopie Cushions is that, as their name suggests, there’s no need to reinflate them between uses — just get up and they’re ready to go again almost immediately. Anyway, since I had a video phone in my pocket, I was able to capture the madness, complete with my boys bouncing up and down with their butts on the Whoopie Cushions in the middle of the aisle… All the while they were bragging about who was the loudest and giggling about how the ‘fart monster’ was coming to get them. Oh, to be young again.

It’s that time of year again. The kids are back in school and it’s time to once again start packing lunches. This is actually a good thing for me, as it gets me back into the habit of packing a lunch for myself every day — I tend to backslide on this during the summer, and end up spending more than I should to eat out. The problem is that mornings around here can be pretty crazy, and lunch-packing just adds to the craziness. So, in order to keep things running as smoothly as possible, we’ve had to come up with creative ways of streamlining our morning routine. Probably the simplest of these steps has to do with sandwich making. [more]

I’ve written previously about the allowance system that we implemented for our kids, and I just thought I’d post a quick update as to how it’s been working, as well as how we’ve tweaked the system since we started. First off, I’d have to say that the system that we created is working quite well. The kids are excited about managing their money, and they’ve done a pretty good job with it so far. Sweeping their long term savings into an ING Direct savings account at the end of each month has been a hit — in fact, they can’t wait to log in to see how much interest they’ve earned each month. It did not, however, take long to realize that the 30/30/30/10 scheme for dividing their money into pots for long term savings, short term savings, spending, and charity was a bit too inflexible. [more]

My wife and I have been making do with a pair of old, do-it-yourself wills that I prepared using an old version of WillMaker (formerly from Nolo Press, now an Intuit product). To give you an idea of just how old this software is, it’s not even Y2K ready — the last time I updated our wills (about four years ago) I had to manually edit the output file to change the year from 1901 to 2001. Anyway, things have changed dramatically for us in the past few years. Both our finances and family have grown. In fact, our two youngest kids aren’t even mentioned in our wills. Thus, it seems like it’s time for an update. [more]

I just ran across a report from Montana State University on teaching your kids about finances. It’s a bit over a year old, but it’s short and worth a read. According to the article, only 7% of parents think that their kids understand financial matters (however that’s defined) and 30% of kids report that their parents never discuss saving and investing with them. They go on to suggest some good topics to discuss with your kids, including how and why your family saves as well as the difference between wants and needs. They also link to a great site on teaching children (and adults) how to save. It’s definitely worth checking out.

I previously wrote about how we’ve gone about setting an allowance for our kids. Briefly, starting at age five they get $0.50 per year of age per week, and this (along with all other money coming in from gifts, etc.) gets divided into one of four pots — spending, short term savings, long term savings, and charity. This weekend I sat down and took the time to set up online bank accounts to hold their long term savings. Since we already bank at ING Direct ($25 account opening bonus), I simply created a subaccount for each of my kids. I then ’swept’ their long term savings from the container on the kitchen counter into their new accounts — this amounts to sticking their money in my pocket and then transferring the same amount from our main account to their subaccounts. I figured that I’d let them collect up their long terms savings a month at a time and then, on the last weekend of the month, we’ll sit down and move the money into their accounts. Despite having done this just two days ago, they’ve already asked a couple of times if they could login and look at their money. I can only imagine their excitement when they see that first interest payment!

A recent post over at AllThingsFinancial prompted me to reassess the way we handle our kids’ allowances. Thus far, we’ve been pretty lax/inconsistent about allowances, and our oldest son has recently been agitating for a more reliable stream of income. After mulling it over, we’ve settled on a new system. [more]