Make Giving A Goal In Your Family

Generous families make life better all around. Giving does good, and giving feels good.

Here’s a simple recipe to make philanthropy a habit in your family.

Three Tricks To Get More Treats From Card Searches

FamZoo’s built-in search and analysis tools for card activity are among the most powerful of any family card platform. They help parents become better money mentors. With FamZoo, parents can see all the card activity details they need — the what, when, how, and why behind any issues kids encounter with their cards.

Here are three quick tricks to help you uncover even more “search treats” hiding in plain sight:

Picking The Perfect Allowance Amount

Another day, another allowance survey.

A 2025 Wells Fargo survey reports that the average weekly allowance parents pay kids is $37.

A 2025 StudyFinds survey says children receive about $119 per month on average.

A 2024 T. Rowe Price survey found the average weekly allowance across respondents was $19.39.

Hot take: allowance surveys are completely useless.

The amount of allowance Parent A pays their child is meaningless for Parent B.

Why?

Boredom-Free Budgeting Practice for Kids

Budgeting is a critical life skill. So, it behooves your child to learn some budgeting basics before leaving the nest. But, like any skill, budgeting takes practice to master.

Unfortunately, few things sound more boring to your kid than: “Let’s build a budget together!’

How do you beat back the yawns? A little AI, an interactive scoreboard, and a cash bonus opportunity.

Try this technique using ChatGPT, Google Sheets and FamZoo. (Of course, you can substitute your favorite AI chatbot, spreadsheet, and payment method.)

Give Kids More Say Over Their Money

In her July “5 Things To Try This Month” newsletter, Gretchin Rubin writes:

“A Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast listener wrote in with a parenting hack: Offer a choice to children, even if it’s a small choice, such as going to bed at 7:30 or 7:34. Like everyone, kids want to feel some amount of control over their daily lives.”

That tiny bedtime choice may seem silly, but it taps into something profound: kids crave a sense of control.

Not only does a stronger sense of control make kids happier, I believe it leads to better learning outcomes and more effective habit formation as well.

With that in mind, what are some financial choices we can give our kids while still setting appropriate boundaries?

Here are seven examples:

Should A Summer Job Signal The End Of Allowance?

I recently received the following thoughtful question from a FamZoo parent (slightly edited to ensure anonymity):

Who Is Struggling With Their Cards?

FamZoo family members often struggle with their cards. Not surprising. Young kids are just learning the financial ropes and discovering the 11 important numbers they need to know. Teenagers inadvertently sign up for subscription services they can’t afford. Elderly family members have senior moments.

Are your family members struggling with their cards? When? Why? Where?

Unless you have activity alerts enabled, you may not know for sure. Even if you do, you may want to collect a handy summary report for a family finance meeting.

Here’s how to capture a quick struggle snapshot across the whole family:

3 Clever Ways To Use Transfer Requests

Who holds the purse strings in a FamZoo family?

Short answer: parents (with lots of lobbying from the kids).

When it comes to money oversight, family members in the parent role are “all powerful”. They can see all of the cards in the family, manage all of the automated money movement rules, and transfer funds instantly between any of the cards.

On the other hand, family members in the child role have restricted powers. They can only see their own cards and can’t move money between cards without parental approval.

Children can seek money movement approval by launching a money transfer request. Here’s how a typical exchange works between a family member in the child role, “Junior”, and a family member in the parent role, “Mom”:

30 Family Finance Tips For Financial Literacy Month

• April

  1
  Start a “Family 401(k)”. This is my all-time favorite family finance hack for teens with W-2 income from a summer or part-time job. It combines a Roth IRA with annual family matching. The arrangement encourages getting a job, forces a long-term investing mindset, and can be truly life changing decades later thanks to the magical power of compounding.
  👉 More info
• April

  2

  Use AI to decipher unexpected charges. As your kids learn the financial ropes with their first debit cards, the chances are near 100% that you’re going to stumble across charges you don’t recognize. When you do, try consulting an AI model from a trusted provider to track them down. The models are getting better and better at decoding cryptic charges and suggesting how to handle them.

  👉 More info

Use AI to Clarify What Kids Buy

AI models are getting better and better at decoding the cryptic charges on your kid’s card.

If you receive a card activity alert or see an entry in a card’s transaction history with a description you don’t recognize, try consulting an AI model from a trusted provider to track it down.

🔒 If you suspect fraud, be sure to lock the card while you investigate.

Case in point: A FamZoo parent recently asked me if I had any insight into this obscure purchase description: “8006837392 USA”.

I turned to ChatGPT for help using the following simple prompt:

Seeing How Kids Pay Keeps Fraud at Bay

Many kids do not know that how they pay with their cards matters when it comes to protecting funds from fraud. For example, swiping the card’s magnetic stripe through a point of sale device exposes the card information to potential skimming devices. Dipping the card into a chip reader or using mobile Tap to Pay doesn’t.

FamZoo has a unique feature that encourages kids to pay more securely. For each transaction (whether successful or not), we show the “card entry mode” on the Transaction Details screen. The entry mode indicates how the payment was made (or attempted in the case of a decline).