Tag Archives: Allowance

Paying An Adult Allowance, A Lunch Experminent

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I’ve decided to pay myself an experimental Adult Allowance!

Currently, as I mentioned in a previous post, I pay my kids an allowance.  A few months ago, joking around, I told my son I was going to start to pay myself an allowance too.  That got me thinking about potential savings from my lunch expense.   In the end, my joke was exactly what I decided to do!

Let me provide my previous background:

Prior to starting my “Paying myself an allowance” experiment, I was spending about an average of $12 on breakfast and lunch per day, for a total of $60 a week.  That’s almost $250 a month!!!  I like going out with friends for lunch, but I don’t like paying that kind of money.

So, I decided to pack breakfast and lunch 4 times a week; enabling me to save at least $40 a week.  This is effectively money that I would have spent by going out to eat with friends, so basically it’s free money for me.  If it wasn’t for this experiment, I would still be spending that money on lunches out at work today!!!

Yeah, the math doesn’t work out perfectly, I left a buffer for special situations that don’t occur regularly, like Co-worker birthdays, cost of packed food, etc…

So you might be wondering how I’m spending on my new revised lunch budget?…

drum roll….: 70 cents a day, $3.50 a week, $14.80 a month.

I’ve  been able to accomplish this by eating instant oatmeal for breakfast, and 2 eggs with ramen noodles (or a small bag of peanuts) for lunch.  The people I use to eat out with looked at me eating my lunch a little oddly at first, but they got use to it.  Plus, I still go out with them once a week, so I’m not a total lunch recluse.

The idea is to save that money in dividend yielding stocks, bond or money markets, then after 2 year, to start using the interest earned off of the investment for other things… maybe even an additional lunch out every other week.

Ideally, after my experiment is over, I’ll be so use to eating out only once a week, that I’ll probably just stick to it.

-MR

UPDATE:  This idea has been implemented as a Lunch Experiment as I describe above!  Read about my “Lunch Experiment” here!

 

Kids Allowance Amount

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I decided to start a weekly allowance for both of my kids after they had their 5th birthday.  I basically decided to keep it simple.  I just give them $1 for each year of age ($5 for my 5-year-old, $9 for my 9-year-old).

Depending on how well I’m doing financially on down the road, I might increase the amounts for both kids once they reach a certain age.  Maybe something like this:

Age Allowance
1 thru 9 $1 for every age year
10 thru 16 $1 per age + $5
16 thru 18/21 $1 per age + $10

So: if my son were 12, then he would get $17 weekly.
if he were 17, then he would get $27 weekly.

I marked “18/21” in the table above, because I haven’t decided yet when to stop providing an allowance to my kids. I might also increase it to $50 once they start college. I’m not sure, It’s still up in the air on that one too.

Update:  My son is now 11 years old as of 2012, but I forgot about the extra five dollars I was going to give him.  Quite honestly though, money has been tight for me lately, so I might delay that increase until he is 13, 14 or 15.  At Age 16, I will make sure he gets the extra $5 plus his age.

Hope you enjoyed my model,

-MR