MoneyManagement posts

Anyone with school age children has probably struggled with the problem of what to do about allowances. More and more these days there seem to be legitimate (and not-so legitimate) reasons for kids to be spending money, but you probably want your children to start learning about money management a bit themselves as they start becoming little consumers.

One way to go about managing this process is to use a site like Active Allowance. Once you sign up, you can set up accounts for your children and checklists of tasks they must accomplish throughout the course of a week. If you pay for a Full account ($49.95/yr) each child gets a virtual bank account, and amasses virtual cash each week. You can choose whether to tie a monetary value to each chore, or simply require that all tasks be done for the child to claim their weekly allowance.

While it seems like a bit of overkill to use a web application to manage allowances, it may well be that children will enjoy the measure of control it gives them. It's certainly more neat and tidy than using a whiteboard on your fridge.

Did they pay? Who still owes money? Where do I stuff all this cash while I wait for everyone to pay-up? Here are some questions you probably don't want to deal with but since you volunteered to be a group treasurer, team manager or money person, you're stuck with.

PayItSquare might be of some help to people like you who are collecting and recording amounts of cash for a group. The beauty of it is people can pay you online via their credit card or a paypal account and you get paid immediately through a paypal account.

We asked Brian Anderson, the founder of PayItSquare, what the service fee was. Here's his response:

Cha-Ching is a Mac OS X (universal binary) app for managing your personal finances. It uses a tag-based approach to categorizing incoming and outgoing transactions. Thanks to iSight integration, you can include photographs of your purchases (for tax or general pack-rat purposes). And of course, like any other personal finance application, you can schedule pending transactions and manage bill payment.

Cha-Ching's web site is sleek and polished and, like many Web 2.0 sites, appears to be perpetually in beta. Or rather, in this case, the app itself is in beta. But that's good news for you, because you can currently purchase a license for $14.95 - ten dollars off the price it'll be once it hits 1.0 status.