Runtime: ~8 minutes
App bridge — same concept, two names. The course uses “Commission” for the extra paid jobs your kid can pick up on top of pocket money. The Lil Banks app calls these Extra Jobs. Same list, same purpose — priced tasks the kid opts in to for extra money. When you set up the app’s Extra Jobs Manager, you’re building your Commission List. Same thing, whichever name you use.
Why this lesson gets a real answer
Most pocket money courses dodge this question. They list three options — earned, given, hybrid — and tell you to pick what suits your family.
I’m not going to dodge. There’s actually pretty good research on this, and there’s an evidence-leaning default that works for most families. So let me give you the real answer first, then unpack why.
The default I recommend: base allowance, plus commission for above-and-beyond work.
Base allowance is unconditional. You’re a member of this family, here’s your practice money. It’s not tied to chores, not tied to behaviour, not withheld as punishment.
Commission is on top of base, for jobs that go beyond normal family contribution. Washing the car. Mowing the lawn. Helping with a big project. Things you’d pay someone else to do.
Normal family chores — make your bed, clear your plate, tidy your toys — those are not for pay. You do them because you live here.
That’s the recommendation. Now let me explain why.
Why not pure earned?
The “pure earned” model says: no chores, no pocket money. You only get paid for what you do.
It sounds responsible. It teaches the link between work and reward, which is real and valuable. So why don’t I recommend it?
Three reasons.
One: it makes the family transactional.
If your child only does chores when they’re getting paid, you’ve turned home into a workplace. There’s a great story about this — a dad who linked pocket money strictly to chores, and one week told his son he had to do the dishes or no pocket money. The son said: “It’s ok. I don’t need any pocket money this week, so I’d rather not do the dishes.”
The kid wasn’t being cheeky. The kid had correctly understood the system the dad had created. In a transactional system, opting out is rational.
Family chores need to be done because the family is doing life together. Putting a price on that breaks something important. Behavioural-economics researcher Daniel Pink has written extensively about this — when you put extrinsic rewards on things that should be intrinsically motivated, you often reduce the underlying motivation. The kid does the dishes for the dollar, then stops doing them for free.
Two: it makes pocket money unpredictable.
Back to Lesson 3 on trust. If pocket money depends on whether your kid did enough chores this week, then it’s negotiable, variable, sometimes missing entirely. The whole foundation of “this arrives reliably every week” disappears. Saving and investing become harder because the income stream is unreliable.
Three: it disconnects “earning” from “creating value.”
The most important earning lesson — the one we’ll really dig into in Lesson 11 — is that money comes from creating value for someone else. Lemonade stand customers. Car wash clients. Marketplace buyers. People who voluntarily hand over money because they got something they wanted.
Paying your kid for chores is the opposite of that lesson. The chore was going to happen anyway. The customer (you) had no choice. There’s no value being created — there’s just a payment being moved around inside the family.
I want my kids’ first earning experiences to involve a stranger or a neighbour saying “yes, I’ll buy that.” That’s the wiring that produces an entrepreneur or a good employee. Not “Mum will pay me a dollar to do what she was going to nag me about anyway.”
Why not pure given?
The “pure given” model is the opposite. You just hand over the pocket money every week, no conditions, no relationship to behaviour or work. The kid gets it because they’re a kid.
I’m warmer to this model than the pure earned one, because at least it preserves the trust foundation. But I still don’t recommend it on its own, because it teaches one thing pretty loudly: money arrives by virtue of who you are, not what you do.
That’s true when you’re seven. It is not true when you’re twenty-seven, and the kid who only learned the “money arrives because I exist” model has a rough adjustment ahead.
You can mitigate this with conversation — “I’m giving you this so you can practice managing money, and the way grown-ups get money is they create value” — but that’s a lot of weight on conversation. Better to show the difference, by also offering commission opportunities.
Why base + commission works
The base allowance teaches: you are a member of this family and you have a stake in family resources. Use them well. It’s stable, reliable, trust-building.
The commission opportunities teach: if you want more, you can create more, by doing work that has real value. It links extra money to extra effort, but optionally — you can take or leave any specific job without losing your base.
Together, they model the actual structure of adult financial life: you have a baseline (your salary or stable income, or in adulthood for many people, partner support / government support / pensions) and you have upside (side projects, freelance work, business income, investments) that you can choose to pursue.
This is also how it works in most well-functioning workplaces. Your base salary doesn’t depend on whether you cleaned the kitchen at work. But bonuses, special projects, going beyond your role — those produce upside.
We’re modelling the world they’ll actually live in.
How to actually run it
Base allowance. A fixed amount, paid the same day every week, no questions. This is the number from Lesson 6. If they had a bad week behaviourally, they still get paid. (Behaviour is a separate conversation, not a money one.)
Family chores list. Have a short, clear list of things every family member does because they live here. Make beds, clear plates, tidy own room, feed the dog, whatever your family does. These are unpaid. Non-negotiable. Done because they’re a member of the household.
Commission list. A separate, visible list — pinned on the fridge, in a shared note — of jobs that are paid. The classic ones:
- Washing the car: $5
- Mowing the lawn: $8 (with appropriate supervision)
- Pulling weeds for an hour: $4
- Helping with a deep clean of a room: $5
- Window washing: $3 per window
- Sorting and tidying the garage / shed / pantry: $5–10
The amounts should be small enough that doing all of them in a week still produces a meaningful but not absurd amount. They shouldn’t be huge — if the commission becomes a fast track to a lot of money, the base allowance loses its centrality.
The key feature: the kid can volunteer for these or not. No-one is required to mow the lawn for pocket money. If they want a bit extra, the list is there. If they don’t, fine.
The “above and beyond” rule.
If you find your kid’s “commission job” is actually something you’d been about to do yourself anyway as a parent — like, you were going to wash the car this weekend — that’s still a legitimate commission. They’re saving you the work.
But if it’s something they were already supposed to do as their family chore — making their bed — you don’t suddenly start paying for it because they want extra money. That’s the slippery slope back to pure-earned.
A note on punishment and bribes
Two things I see well-meaning parents do that quietly undermine the system.
Don’t dock pocket money as punishment. Their money is theirs. If they misbehave, address the misbehaviour directly. Don’t dock the Save Bank because they didn’t put their shoes away — you’ll teach them that “their money” isn’t really theirs, and the trust foundation cracks.
Don’t bribe with money. “I’ll give you $5 if you stop tantrumming in this shop” might work in the moment, but you’ve just taught them that tantrums are a revenue source. Address the tantrum with parenting, not currency.
The pocket money system is the money system. Everything else is parenting. Keep them separate.
What’s coming
Next lesson — the actual setup. Step by step. The day-of, the conversation, the first transfer, the our money rules you both sign.
A note on Weekly Tasks in the app
The Lil Banks app has a feature called Weekly Tasks — recurring commitments (making the bed, feeding the dog, homework) you can optionally link to allowance. When linked, allowance only pays out if the targets are met.
Here’s my honest recommendation on this feature: don’t use the link at all for the first four weeks. Weekly Tasks are useful as a tracking device — the visible tick sheet keeps kids honest about the household responsibilities they’ve committed to. But the moment you make the allowance contingent on them, you’re back in “pocket money is payment for chores” territory, and everything I’ve said in this lesson about the transactional-family risk kicks in.
The safer default: run Weekly Tasks purely as habit tracking, not as an allowance gate. Add the gate later, deliberately, if a specific pattern breaks down and you and your kid agree it’s the right response. Or don’t add it at all — plenty of families never do, and their systems work fine.
Read Lesson 7 as the philosophy; treat the “Link to allowance” toggle in the app as an escape hatch you probably don’t need.
Action for this lesson: Write down your family Weekly Task list (unpaid). Write down your commission list (paid, optional). Show both to your kid sometime this week — not yet as a system, just as a conversation. “I’m thinking about this — what do you think?”
— Bec
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