How To Manage A Teen Clothing Budget

Parents often ask me how to teach teens budgeting basics. My favorite approach takes a page from the envelope budgeting system playbook, but with a digital twist.

In the traditional envelope system, each category of spending has its own labeled envelope stuffed with the budgeted allocation of cash for the month. Purchases must be funded with the cash from the appropriate envelope. So, all clothing purchases come out of the envelope labeled “clothing”. Super simple.

For the digital twist, replace cash-stuffed envelopes with automatically loaded FamZoo cards. So, all clothing purchases come out of the card labeled “clothing”. Still super simple. And it works in today’s online world where cash is no longer welcome.

When introducing teens to budgeting, I recommend keeping things narrowly focused. No need to overwhelm. Start by choosing just one envelope outside of everyday spending. Clothing is typically an excellent choice for teens.

Here’s how to get your system up and running:

7 Ways To Move Money To Kids

What’s the best way to move money to your kids?

Trick question. It depends. It depends on their ages and circumstances. It depends on your money values and the messages you want to deliver.

Here are seven options to consider:

Hey Siri, Hey Google: "FamZoo Balance."

Wouldn’t it be cool and convenient to retrieve your card balance from your phone by just talking to it? A short, sweet voice command like:

“Hey Siri, FamZoo balance.”

on your iPhone.

Or:

“Hey Google, FamZoo balance.”

on your Android phone.

Alternatively, if you need to keep things quiet, what if you could retrieve your balance with a single tap on a special home screen icon?

And what if you could quickly kick off other cool automated commands too, like:

How To Raise Super-Saver Kids in 5 Simple Steps

George Samuel Clason’s 1926 classic, The Richest Man in Babylon, popularized the adage “pay yourself first” as a pillar of wealth building.

Easy to say. Hard to do. Particularly for kids.

How do we translate Clason’s undeniably sound principle into a lasting habit for our children?

Follow these five steps:

Category Codes Carry Clues to Kids' Transactions

Where did that transaction come from?

Between kids just learning the financial ropes, teens pushing boundaries, merchants deploying dark patterns, and fraudsters pouncing on vulnerabilities, parents routinely have to don their detective hats to track down the source of “mystery” charges. Occasionally it’s fraud. Most times it isn’t (see Five Flavors of Faux Fraud).

This month, we added a new tool to the FamZoo transaction tracking toolbox: merchant category codes, or MCCs for short. MCCs are defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and used to classify merchants by the type of goods or services provided. When the transaction description fails to unlock the mystery of a purchase’s origin, the MCC description just might do the trick.