My allowance as a kid/teen was whatever money my mom hadn’t spent of my paycheck by the time I got home from work.
$0 as a teen, had to work once I was 10 starting with paper route.
Before that I got $3.25 every Sunday which I saved up for 50% of an N64 and then convinced my dad to help me buy it for Christmas one year which he agreed to.
He was extra generous and bought Super Mario World so I had a game to play day 1.
Oops.
Mowed lawns after age 12. Had 4 neighbors and made about $40 a week at the peak of summer.
You ever scrounge for lost cash? Swimming pool change rooms and the return slots on vending machines were my go to. Usually never found much more than a few coins, but sometimes you’d find paper bills!
Yup, we used to get all our arcade quarters by checking all the coin op lockers, especially underneath if there was space. There used to be at least a simpsons arcade games worth for my brothers and I.
I got 100 francs a week which is roughly 15€, but it was supposed to pay for my train tickets to and from boarding school. However if I played my cards right and skipped one ticket I could have 50 francs which could buy one iron maiden album (used) from the local record store.
Ha, I used to do the same thing, but with the $3/day I got to buy lunch at school. I would skip lunch, then head to the record shop in town and raid their used racks once or twice a week for CDs. Pretty sure that was even where and how I picked up my first Iron Maiden CD.
i maintained the exterior of the property, i cooked half of the meals, i cleaned the interior except for my parents’ room. i did the plumbing and some of the electrical. built walls. that was my rent. if i wanted fun money i had to get a job. what is this allowance?
Sounds like you did have a job
i mean i was one generation off of the farm, disabled, my parents explicitly had kids so they wouldn’t have to maintain their property (just like their parents before them) and they did no parenting unless we drew a lot of blood in our fights. that left me with most of the household maintenance for a family of six starting around the age of eight.
My younger sister got $20 a week then $50 after 13
I got $20 whenever my parents felt like it and used it to pay for school breakfast/lunch until the money would run out and I got caught steeling money out of my Dad’s wallet then had to get a part job and pay rent, as soon as I was old enough.
I liked Shaquille O’Neal’s comment: My kids said “we’re rich” and I said “you’re not rich, I’m rich – you just live in a rich person’s house”.
I had basically no allowance. I’ve been working since I was a kid. I would just do small jobs around the neighborhood, mostly gardening. Every summer break, I’d work for probably 10-15 hours every week at $10/hr. And that ended up letting me buy my first car when I was 16 for $8000.
Early to mid 2000’s, I earned one quarter each time I cleaned the cat box. Kept tallies on a chart and was paid monthly. Eventually I decided it wasn’t worth it. My parents disagreed.
Really? I’m the only one who remembers Grandad telling Huey Freeman this?
I allow you breath my air 😂
Previous generations (in 50’s-60’s) teens were expected to get a part time job and contribute some money to the family budget.
yeah, previous generations to mine,
teenskids just worked on the farm. that’s why we were in the city.edit: teenagers did not exist in the generations i’m referring to. you went child to adult.
The invention of the teenager is an interesting topic to read about, by the way.
right? the changing of society as we went agrarian to urban is so neat. it’s part of why i studied history, then i forget, then history again, then economics with an emphasis in history in college. well that and the personality issues
our econ department had the best fundraising t-shirt:
[college] department of economics: we don’t wonder why we don’t get invited to parties. we know.
No allowance. We were to do chores and earned credit toward a big thing. one example I remember well is about a year of saving for TVs, and we didn’t even make it halfway to the target amount ($100 each was the target, this was mid-90s) so I assume we were making peanuts for each week’s chores… needless to say neither of us were enthusiastic about it…
At 16 I got a full time job and my parents worked with the school to allow me to leave for work in the afternoon. The next year they didn’t feel like messing with it, so I was emancipated (given legal control over, and responsibility for, myself) and could show up whenever I want and leave whenever I want. That worked well, and my senior year I was on campus for a total of 1.5 hours a day (only needed 2.5 elective credits that year, but they wouldn’t let me take them all in one semester because “reasons”, so I took a cooking class right before lunch both semesters) the rest of the time I was either sleeping or working.
Negative $. I got rented out to mow lawns, general yard work, chores, etc.
I know we must have had an allowance, but I’m not sure how much? I know I used that to save up and buy a Gameboy Color and Pokémon Crystal. Which was…90 dollars or something? I just remember I had 90 with me, maybe. It got me the Gameboy at least. Maybe mom bought Crystal?
Then she made me share it with my twin. They could have saved themselves! Bluh.
I also know you’re going to read this, twin.
Sporadically the equivalent of 60 cents (pre-euro times), then the equivalent of about ~12 euros in my late teens, before I got a job. It was enough for 1 dinner at a restaurant 1 notch above fast food (I guess Applebee’s would be a US equivalent).
Then I got a job and sunk my whole savings, and the first year of wages, in a laptop. It was quite cool, but questionable financially.
Can I ask a naive question? I can’t really travel much: in regards to euros: Are the fractions of those called cents? I saw you saying “the equivalent of” and I’m trying to do mental math, and what since here in statesia we have cents I wanted to make sure I’m doing the right conversion
I think “technically” they are eurocents but everyone and their dog just call them cents.
I mentioned “the equivalent of” because this was pre-euro where every European country had its own currency which nobody under 30 or outside of one particular country understands anymore.
I can’t see any good result of answering this given the other responses and the justifiable resentment behind them. But I’m gonna because I have poor impulse control.
I started college at eleven. My mom would drop me off for my classes and pick me up after. As a result, I was often responsible for my own meals. Many of those were White Castle sliders or ramen but sometimes my fellow students who - unlike me - could drive would take me to the nearby restaurants. (There was technically a cafeteria on campus, but it wasn’t there when I started and wasn’t very good after it was established.) My parents thus granted me $22.50 per week for an allowance.
You went to college at eleven?
To speed run this conversation:
My elementary school administered a few tests my mother felt were unfair to both my middle brother and me. A few times after my second grade teacher made derogatory comments about me (and possibly my brother’s teacher did towards him, I am uncertain). Her TA was awesome though. My teacher eventually said during a PTA meeting “I’m not going to teach more than two grades above my grade” and, in every class, simply sat me at the school’s then only computer with some turtle based drawing game.
At the time, I was very hurt. I held on to that for a long time. It was only two or so years ago, when talking to my wife, that I realized the teacher’s decision was a relatively reasonable one. The situation maybe could have been handled or at least expressed better, but the sentiment was reasonable.
However, my mom didn’t feel so. Between that and whatever was happening with my middle brother, she made the decision to homeschool that brother and me.
(I have two other siblings. The oldest is complicated. The second oldest attended public school longer but started college at twelve and got his Ph.D. in pure mathematics at somewhere between 25-30.)
I was homeschooled from age seven to eleven, then went to college from eleven to fifteen. (I graduated two days before I turned sixteen.) My mom was grateful for the timing of her ESRD diagnosis because I was her youngest and she was diagnosed a few months after she finished homeschooling me, so she was able to focus on her health rather than schooling. I have a very distinct memory of, at twelve (when I was absurdly fit), before her diagnosis but after she started realizing there were problems, physically catching her when she said “I’m fine,” stood up, and immediately passed out. This happened more than once.
I gained a two year degree. I took four years to get it because I was taking every computer class they had except for “introduction to Unix” because when was I going to use that? Incidentally, my current career started with - and is heavily based on - Linux. Maybe 11-15 year olds don’t make the most educated decisions.
The admission process was easier for me than it would have been for most because both of my older brothers had gone to, and graduated from, the same college at a comparatively young age. My eldest brother had to face a whole committee to get approval to attend. I only had to face a few people and they mostly knew me because I had been riding along with my mother as she drove my brothers there for years. I don’t remember what my GPA was when I graduated, it wasn’t great, but I did graduate.
