Running Short On Kiddie Payday? Card IOUs Keep Your Commitments.

It’s bound to happen eventually.

Payday rolls around for the kids, and suddenly you realize you’re short of funds on your parent card. Oops!

The last thing you want to do is stiff your own kid.

No worries. We’ve got your kid’s back. No need for you to remember your missed payments or record them elsewhere. FamZoo automatically tracks all shortfalls in parent payments — like allowance, chore rewards, interest, reimbursements, etc.

The missed payments are recorded as card IOUs on the recipient’s card. The current total owed is displayed as an additional balance just beneath the card’s cash balance. Clicking on the total reveals the history and details of every missed payment.

The next time you reload your primary funding card, FamZoo will automatically repay any outstanding card IOUs in the family, but only if the IOU can be repaid in full.

Parents aren’t the only ones on the hook for missed payments. Card IOUs work in the opposite direction too.

Suppose the end of the month rolls around, and your kid suddenly realizes her card is short of funds to pay the auto-debit you set up to cover her share of the family cell phone plan. Oops!

No worries. And no nagging. We’ve got your parental back. In this case, the missed payment is recorded as a negative IOU on her card. A negative IOU total means she owes the primary funding card money instead of vice versa. As a result, subsequent parent payments (allowance, chore rewards, interest, etc) reduce the IOU debt first without adding any actual funds to the card. Only when the IOU is fully repaid will additional money start flowing to her card again.

Note: card IOUs are never recorded on the primary funding card itself — just the other cards in the family. Card IOUs are always relative to the primary funding card. A card with a positive IOU is owed money by the primary funding card. A card with a negative IOU owes money to the primary funding card.

Running short of funds as described above is the most common way card IOUs are created, but there are some other rare cases. Here are the different situations in which card IOUs can accumulate:

1. There are insufficient funds on the sending card (as in the examples above).
2. The primary funding card or the card on the other end of the transfer is locked.
3. The primary funding card or the card on the other end of the transfer is inactive (typically while being replaced).
4. An outage or system error occurs at the time of the attempted transfer.

Remember, automatic repayment of card IOUs only happens when:

1. reloading the primary funding card,
2. the primary funding card owes the money (i.e., positive IOUs), and
3. an outstanding IOU can be repaid in full.

If you need to make an IOU repayment or partial repayment outside of those conditions, you can do so manually at any time using the Repay IOU action link.

Sometimes an IOU repayment is no longer warranted. Perhaps you repaid your child outside FamZoo, or the parent payment causing the IOU was an accident, or you changed your mind about some chore penalties. In those cases, you can adjust or cancel the IOU by following these steps.

You’ll find the card IOU help section HERE.