3min Video Review of FamZoo by Family Finance Blogger Kelly Whalen

Family finance blogger, Kelly Whalen, over at The ¢entsible Life reviews FamZoo in this short 3 minute video. Check it out:

PS: If you're feeling a mild sense of déjàvu, you're not imagining things. I first mentioned this review in a March 2nd post, but it was embedded in a much longer video and could only be viewed in a tiny player that was quite challenging to navigate. In the meantime, I've extracted the relevant section of video in a larger format, mixed in some cartoons and screenshots to illustrate Kelly's points, and delivered it through a higher quality player from Vimeo.com. I hope you'll find it to be a more pleasant viewing experience!

PPS: For those who might be interested in producing their own videos like this, the software I'm using is ScreenFlow for the Mac, and I highly recommend it. The groovy music in the intro and the outro is “Bare Feet Bossa” - a royalty free track that I purchased from Loopsound.com.

What's the Tooth Fairy's going rate these days? $10? Are you serious?

My friend's kid just lost his first tooth. The Tooth Fairy cometh — tonight! But how much should the TF leave under the pillow? My friend is surveying his buddies on Facebook to get some input, so I figured I'd take the opportunity to do some spelunking in the FamZoo database to get some real statistics for him¹.

Here's what I found based on credit transactions containing the word "tooth" (after eliminating a few spurious ones referring to "BlueTooth" which would have seriously skewed things!):

Min	Max	Average/Mean	Median	Mode
$1.00	$10.00	$2.63	$2.00	$1.00

$10? Whoaaa! Maybe that was for a whole mouthful. Or, maybe the parent was playing catchup for some previous missed visits.

Anyway, if we consider $10 and up to be outliers, throw them out, and re-run the stats, we get:

Min	Max	Average/Mean	Median	Mode
$1.00	$5.00	$2.31	$2.00	$1.00

Personally, I favor giving a dollar. Maybe two for a molar or even more for some sort of painful dentist extraction.

If you're looking for some additional commentary, stories, and lots of opinions, you'll enjoy the Wall Street Journal blog post "How Much Does Your Tooth Fairy Give?"

What about your family? How much (or what) does your Tooth Fairy give?

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¹To protect privacy, we only disclose anonymous aggregate statistics. So, those of you who gave in the high or low range, don't worry, your secret is safe with us!

In Dog We Trust? Does a Cashless Allowance Work for Your Family?

I'm a big fan of David Owen's book The First National Bank of Dad (←affiliate link), but apparently my 8 year old prefers to put his money in the First National Bank of Dog instead.

As a follow-on to his "Don't Let Your Dog Eat Your Money" tip from last week, my son presented me with this hand-made deposit slip filled with coins he'd been collecting in his Piggy Bank. I guess he'd decided that his cash stash was getting big enough that the risk of theft from siblings was getting uncomfortably high. Time to put it in the virtual family bank. Good call.

I noticed that he called it a "Colby Check" (Colby is our miniature dachshund — the unofficial FamZoo mascot and successor to our dearly departed Bonzo). This provided the perfect opportunity to have a little chat about the difference between a deposit slip and a check, and how both work in general. It was a nice impromptu teachable moment.

FamZoo's virtual family bank helps parents follow what some call a "cashless allowance approach". You can read a nice brief description of the approach in Greg Katz's recent article "Cashless Allowance System Seems to Work".

Some people say that the approach robs children of the experience of handling real, tangible money. I haven't found that to be the case. Kids still have opportunities to interact with real money - opportunities like the "Bank of Dog" deposit experience I shared with my son. You can always let the kids withdraw (reasonable amounts of) spending cash from their "cashless" accounts to stick in their wallets, purses, or piggy banks for moderate impromptu pending or emergencies. In our case, I guess that would be the "Bank of Dog ATM" scenario.

What do you think of the cashless allowance (aka "Bank-of-Mom/Dad/Dog") model? Have you tried it with your kids? We'd love to hear about your experiences. What's worked well? What hasn't?