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:

The recipient of the request defaults to the funding cardholder — me in this case. The amount is automatically filled in to match the original expense. There are, however, some cases where your teen might request more (a delivery bonus? ha!) or less (strip out some extracurricular items?). The Why? field can be left blank or filled in as necessary to plead a case or provide context. In this case, some explanation was helpful since my wife initiated the errand.

As soon as Will submits the form, he can see that his request is pending back on the Transactions page.

Meanwhile, I receive the following email notification:

I tap on the link to get to an approval form:

A “thank you” and one tap later, he’s got his money!

For posterity, we can both review the history anytime, by drilling down on the transaction to see this screen:

That’s it. Easy-peasy. So get your teen off the couch and out on some family shopping errands asap.