Pocket money for Amy

[pne]

Stella and I had a talk last night wherein she suggested that it might be time for Amy to start getting pocket money. (I think in the US this is usually called an allowance?)

What prompted this[*] was that, Stella said, Amy often sees things she "needs" (though when she speaks English, it actually comes out as "meeds", as in "I meed that"), whether it's clothing or sweets or whatever, and having a finite amount of spending money of her own that might help her realise that things cost money and once you've bought something, you have less (or no) money left, so it's better to ration the money and to think twice before buying something.

I asked Stella whether she would also be telling Amy about tithing and she said that she wouldn't force her to deduct tithing but would tell her about it and let her choose, which seems fair enough. And since the tentative number we came up with was a euro a week, she thought she'd give her ten 10-cent pieces which would make it easier to figure tithing, as well as possibly feeling like more (I can imagine that at Amy's age, it might well be "one money" for €1 vs. "ten moneys" for 10×10¢...).

Related question: did you get pocket money as a child? How often, how much, and starting at what age? Did you call it pocket money, allowance, or something else?

When I was a child, our pocket money increased automatically at each birthday... I think that by the time we were old enough to get pocket money monthly rather than weekly, it was 5 marks more a month at each birthday, but it's been so long I don't remember the details well. I do remember that at one point, my sister Jennifer got 50 Pfennig a week, which was the cost of a Kinder Milchschnitte at the time, and that that was her basic unit of currency: when we talked about money, she'd ask how much that was in Milchschnitten.

Any other amusing incidents relating to pocket money?

And what were you expected to buy from it? I remember that another boy had to buy clothing from his pocket money, and that he delivered newspapers in order to earn enough money; our pocket money was purely for "luxuries", since basics including clothing were covered by our parents. (Though if we had wanted specific clothing, or (say) new shoes even though our old ones were still fine, we probably would have been expected to buy that ourselves.)

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[*] My first thought was "Der Auslöser dafür war..." but I couldn't think of a good translation for "Auslöser", and dict.leo.org (including a brief skim of the relevant forum entries) didn't provide anything good either, so rephrasing seemed best.

Comments

[squigglz.livejournal.com]

I got pocket money, but not until I was about ten years old, and it was $2 a week. (Granted, I was raised by my grandparents, who thought $2 a week would be enough for lunch wherever I wanted every day.) I wasn't expected to buy anything in particular, though-I could get whatever I wanted. It was 'extra'. Couldn't buy my own clothes and stuff until I had an actual job at 16, though.

Most of my amusing incidents with pocket money were realizing that I hadn't bought the stuff I needed for a school project and having to run to Clover (now defunct store that was about a mile away-easy walking) to get it with what little allowance I had left (I would invariably remember this on a Sunday evening, by which time my Friday allowance was mostly gone).