TOS Crew Review: Family Mint

As part of the TOS Crew, I was asked to review a FREE website called The Family Mint.

Using The Family Mint you will be able to:

• track your children’s allowance
• track your children’s spending
• set goals
• set and adjust interest rates
• have all your children’s accounts in one central location.

It's very easy to set up an account for each of your kids and then keep track of allowances and what they are saving, giving, spending, etc. The idea is to teach your kids how to handle their money by saving up for items, keeping track of giving, and recording what money they spend.

Although the website service is free, they will be coming out with a PRO version that does have a fee.

It only took a few minutes to create our family bank. Each child has a profile and we made a deposit of the money they are currently saving. This is a really great way to keep track of what you owe your kids in allowance, gift money, etc! R9 earns money with some of her sewing and from selling some of her older toys to other families (she has sold her princess collection, her Barbies, her Angelina Ballerina stuff) and we had to make sure she kept track of it all when it was time to total it up and buy the new American Girl doll in Boston!

Using The Family Mint makes it easy to record and remember all the money that changes hands around here at various gift giving occasions, etc.

If you are a family who gives "commission" for jobs done around the house rather than allowance, this makes it really easy to record the money you owe a child. I ended up putting my kids on "salary" because it was impossible for me to micromanage the earnings for a child for any given job they did. The Family Mint has me reconsidering this. We keep the money in a family bank and then the kids can help manage their accounts.

It only works if you go in with the understanding that whatever is recorded in a child's account is money you really owe them. It is a loan to you to keep track of it and then when it's time to pay out, that really happens. However, the online program is just a tracking system. So, there's no actual financial information for anyone to hack into.

I think this is a terrific tool for parents and kids to use in teaching the vital skill of financial management.