Create Your Own "Dad Cents" Family Bank with FamZoo

Every family has it own little nuances, and there’s no one “right way” to prepare your kids for the real world.

That’s why making it easy to customize FamZoo has been a core design principle from the outset. You should be able to configure your Virtual Family Bank in a way that makes sense for your family and your unique values.

The following video is just one example of how you can customize FamZoo to match a unique perspective. Has you family customized FamZoo to emphasize a particular value, perspective, or technique? If you’re comfortable sharing, we’d love to hear about it!

Here’s a transcript of the video:

Hey everybody! Bill Dwight here from FamZoo.com.

Just recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Shane Barkley, the author of Dad Cents - Teach Your Children the Biblical Principles of Money.

We talked for hours. And the more we talked, the more excited we got.

That’s because it became clear that FamZoo is a really easy way to take the principles described in Shane’s book and put them into into practice with your family.

Let’s take just one simple example. In Chapter 18, Shane introduces the “60% Rule”. That’s the idea of learning to live on 60% of your income. In other words, just 60% goes towards spending. Where does the rest go? Giving, saving, and taxes.

In his book, Shane recommends introducing your kids to the 60% rule early on. How? Divide their allowance into different parts or categories for spending, giving, saving and taxes.

Taxes on kids? Yep! I know what you’re thinking. My first reaction was, hey, I don’t want to tax my kids! But, the more I thought about it - Shane’s approach makes a lot of sense.

It warms kids up to that unavoidable concept and makes their first real paycheck experience less of a shock. But more importantly, the pooled tax money goes to an outing or an item that’s fun for the family. Everyone (parents too!) chips in for the benefit of the whole family. That’s a good thing.

Now, to track all this stuff — how allowances are being divvied up into categories, how much is currently in each one, interest you’re awarding on savings, and so on — Shane recommends setting up a system he refers to as the Family Bank.

Now you can do all this on a spreadsheet (like I used to do), or even pencil and paper. But, this is where FamZoo comes into the picture. We make it super easy to set up your own Dadcents Family Bank. We automate everything we can — like allowance and interest delivery. And the cool thing is that you and your kids can access it online from a browser, or from a cell phone when you’re on the go. Plus we have all kinds of extra built-in tools to help you teach your kids good personal finance habits. You start really simple and then get more and more sophisticated as they grow from young kids to tweens to teens.

So, let me show you how easy it is to set up your own Dad Cents Family Bank on FamZoo.

After registering your family on FamZoo and adding your family members, you’re ready to set up your family bank.

We have a simple wizard that walks you through some of the most common bank setups.

One setup, the Spend-Save-Give plan, is a pretty close match to the Dad Cents approach. We’ll start there and then make a few additions. Let’s update the account names to match what’s in the book. Let’s set the interest rate on the savings to be pretty aggressive and monthly as Shane recommends.

Click on save and we’re almost there. You can see we have a three-way split in allowance right now, so let’s make a couple of tweeks to exactly match the Dad Cents approach.

First, let’s add an additional Giving account for the special Offerings. As Shane describes in the book, this will be for periodic donations to charitable projects of your child’s choosing.

Second, let’s add an account for the family Taxes.

Now, all we have to do is edit the allowance and update the split percentages to match what’s suggested in the book.

That’s it. We’re all set to go.

Back on the Overview page, we can see that weekly allowances are automatically scheduled to be delivered each Friday.

Likewise, monthly interest payments are automatically scheduled for delivery.

Now, if your child needs to make a withdrawal for a purchase or a donation, just click on the minus button next to the right account. You hand the money over to your child (or pay for the item yourself using whatever means is appropriate) and deduct that amount from their account.

In the case of a deposit, your kid hands the money over to you. You click on the plus button to credit the right account and put the real money wherever appropriate. Just remember, like a real bank, you owe the balance to your depositor. It’s your kid’s money and you need to be able to redeem it upon request.

So, that’s a very quick intro to setting up your own Dad Cents bank in FamZoo.

If you have any questions or comments, don’t hestitate to contact us at FamZoo.com.

Or, you can contact Shane at DadCents.com.

Thanks for watching, and we look forward to hearing from you!