Nickel Please

There are (2) magic words that work wonders whenever we are checking out with the cashier at a store that offers their own store credit card.  Those (2) words are “Dave Ramsey”.  If you are not familiar with Dave, he promotes Financial Peace University which is offered (among other places) at local churches everywhere.  He is a big fan of paying cash for everything and is very much against credit cards of any kind.  Debt of any kind is the enemy.  We follow his plan to an extent and the last time I owned or used a credit card was when I rented the U-Haul to move back to Indiana (so, approximately 19 months).  We each have a debit card tied to our joint checking account and other than our mortgage we have no debt (both cars are paid for, etc).  We are chipping away at our 15 year mortgage little by little.

One way we are doing this is by charging our children a nickel for bad behavior.  Any infraction of house rules has the same charge more or less, a single nickel.  The violations range from forgetting to put away the dishes (a daily chore) to leaving clothes on the floor to inappropriate conversation at the dinner table.  Each child has a file on the desktop of our main computer so we can keep track of the money owed.  Once a child has reached $1.00 in fines, they have to pay at which time we delete the list of trespasses.  Here is the current file for the son…

$0.65 - 09/30/10  6:28 PM - Inappropriate dinner conversation
$0.60 - 09/30/10  8:15 AM - Left laptop in living room after bedtime
$0.55 - 09/30/10  7:00 AM - Did not put dirty plate in sink
$0.50 - 09/28/10  8:30 PM - Left laptop in living room after bedtime
$0.45 - 09/28/10  7:00 PM - Did not put school uniform in laundry
$0.40 - 09/27/10  8:30 PM - Did not put away clothes
$0.35 - 09/21/10  7:05 PM - Left shoes in living room
$0.30 - 09/21/10  7:02 PM - Tipping back chair at dinner table
$0.25 - 09/21/10  7:01 PM - Tipping back chair at dinner table
$0.20 - 09/21/10  6:55 PM - Tipping back chair at dinner table
$0.15 - 09/19/10 12:01 PM - Did not make bed
$0.10 - 09/19/10 10:30 AM - Writing on his arm with ink pen ($0.05 per word)

As you can see we mark the date, time and description so there is no argument.  Note that there were (3) consecutive “tipping of the chair” infractions.  We just started this a month or so ago and each child has had to pay $1.  I take the $1 and immediately put it in the change jar.  The money in that jar (once it reaches a big enough pile) is placed directly on the mortgage.  So in a way, we are paying off our house with our kid’s poor behavior.

Now you might think that $0.05 is not a lot of money.  To that I would say that 1) it really adds up and 2) my kids are greedy (to an extent).  Currently this amount is enough to deter the continuing of the behavior (which as you can tell with the chair tipping) would result in more nickel penalties.  The current record so far is (4) straight penalties.  I suppose when it becomes obvious that the amount is too small then we can increase it to a dime.  Also, since I have a financial gain to any bad behavior, I can point this out if the child is doing something to upset me.  The son especially does not like owing me money so our policy of not letting him pay off his “debt” until it reaches $1 discourages bad behavior as well.  All in all this plan is working as you can see from the example above that there is only (1) infraction per day on average over the last (2) weeks.

Well the kids are in bed and I just noticed that the daughter left her stuffed animals in the dining room (she has been reminded to put them up before going to bed) so I need to add this to her file.

Jon