The Best in Family Finance - August 2014

If you hang out on our Facebook page, you already know we review boat loads of articles on family finance each month so you can concentrate on just reading the good ones! And if you just want to peruse the very best ones, you’ll always find them here.

The top family finance picks for August?

Turn Your Teen into a Shopping Errand Machine

Usually the combination of a teen, a car, and money is enough to scare the daylights out of any parent. Here’s how to turn that terrible trifecta into a big win: send your teen on shopping errands for the family. It gets your teen off the couch. It saves you time. It provides plenty of opportunities for teachable money moments — like how to comparison shop.

Win. Win. Win.

Here’s an extra bonus for families with FamZoo prepaid cards: we just made the whole “Mom/Dad, can you pay me back for the stuff I just bought?” routine super-simple by building in some new app(lication) features dedicated to streamlining reimbursements between family members.

For example, just this week, my wife sent our son, Will, on a grocery errand to pick up some grillables for the family dinner.

Here’s the expense as it appeared on Will’s Transactions page in the FamZoo app:

Naturally, Will wants to be repaid — and pronto. So, he taps on the arrow just beneath the amount to get to this Request Reimbursement form: