The Town of Odyssey

Had a discussion with one of my customers the other day that got me wondering something. Did you get an allowance as a kid? If so, how much? For me, it was $2 every Friday. This was in the late 90s & early 2000s.

No, I didn't. If there was a particularly large project that we pitched in to help with....like painting the fence or something...my Dad would pay us $20 or so. We worked for our neighbors occasionally to dog sit or rake leaves and got paid for that. We got money for birthday or Christmas gifts.
But no regular weekly allowance just because...we were expected to do normal chores as part of the family working together.

My husband got an allowance growing up, and he wants to start that this summer for my oldest boys so they can start saving, giving, and learning about money.

I didn't either. Every once in a while I'd be given $20-50 for helping out with loading/unloading hay though. Certainly not every time with 4 hay cuttings a year and at least 6 trips to my grandparents farm(we've got 9 horses and my grandparents grow some hay for us), but it was a nice bonus. Besides, hay trips were when I got to listen to Odyssey the most growing up.

Every summer me and my siblings (sometimes cousins too) would do some odd jobs around the farm for Grandma and she would give us kids a hundred bucks for our savings. As we got older and capable of doing actual work, she started giving us a lot more. That was super generous of her. I miss those days.

Once in a while my Dad would give me some money for building fence and that sort of thing, but it was pretty rare.

We would get a certain amount for jobs that we were expected to do…generally amounting to about $2/wk.

Yeah I got like a dollar every Friday when I was really young.

At some point that evolved into $20 a month.

But it wasn’t totally free money, I had a fair amount of chores and responsibilities etc.

Once I hit 16 and could get a job (which I immediately did), that was the end of the gravy train!

we got paid for doing chores, which were tracked on a chart on our fridge. if we missed a chore, that was deducted from our pay. this system would last as long as my parents remembered, which was usually about two months. then it would go away for a few months until one of them remembered that we were doing it. that might have also been because we were really poor and the money needed to go elsewhere. that eventually evolved into me getting paid $10 to mow the lawn, until one particularly rainy summer when the lawn had to be mowed like three times a week. they couldn't afford me any more.

We never got allowances growing up, no. Sometimes though, there would be odd jobs that wasn't apart of our everyday chores that we could get paid 25-50 cents for, haha. A few times me and my brothers would do odd jobs for our neighbor and he would pay us a little to do that. It was just never a thing in our family for allowances, and I personally didn't really mind. It was just expected of us to all chip in and do our part and we got food and a roof over our heads in return so that's how we looked at it.