A buck a week starting in 1st grade and it went up a quarter every birthday.
I started out getting .25 a week in first grade with .25 increases at the beginning of each school year until I was old enough to earn money babysitting, cutting grass, doing odd jobs for my dad’s side business and doing restaurant work. I started first grade in 1969.
$0.50 every other week.
This was not in the 1950’s, it was in the 90’s. It did not teach me to set financial goals and save, it taught me that not lifting a finger and forgoing the allowance and getting yelled at was better than doing chores every single day and receiving (very reluctantly) a laughably small sum regularly but infrequently.
I guess it taught me about rebellion and strategic default.
Born in 60 - a dime plus my age in pennies. So at age 11 I got 21 cents. No idea how old I was when I started getting one - i assume 5-6 or so.
I started receiving an allowance in the early nineties. I want to say I was ten or eleven.
I got a whopping two whole dollars a week. I still managed to impress my father, though. I managed to save my money for three weeks to get a Star Trek TNG action figure I wanted. I repeated this process at least three more times. I really blew his mind after I graduated to five dollars a week in the mid-nineties. I managed to save all of my allowance for nearly two months just so I could get Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” on CD. I cherished that album for years…
When I was younger I used to get one penny for each year of my age. That is a British old penny, of which there were 240 to the pound. (It went up considerably when, or perhaps a bit before, I reached my teens.)
Early 1950’s, about 10 years old, 10¢/week.
Allowance?
No really, I never got an allowance. I did get jobs away from home. I started doing yard work when I was eight. One day on my walk home from school I took a short cut through a back alley. In it was an old lawn mower with a broken wheel and a rusty deck. I asked at the house if I could have it. The lady said that I could take the other one too. It was in the back yard. In two weeks I was mowing lawns in addition to the yard work. I made one working mower out of the two.
I started buying my own clothes at age ten. By age 13, I bought all of my clothes, as well as all of my school supplies. I worked delivering papers before school, then after school I did yard work. In an average week I mowed twenty yards. My junior year of High School I still delivered papers, (three routes), I mowed lawns, I worked at the hardware store two hour two days a week, and I pumped gas at the Exxon station four nights a week. On the weekends, I set chokers for my cousins logging crew.
By my senior year, I had bought my own car and I supported it and myself as well as giving my folks $50.00 a month.
I am not bitter about this. It did shape how I think about some things though.
UKer chiming in here. Up until 1971 I used to get 2 bob (shillings) a week, which now sounds positively Dickensian!
- which I would immediately spend on harlots and laudinum.
5 pesetas per year of age, starting at age 9 (so 45 pta). When I was 14 I dared ask for a raise to 75 whole pesetas rather than the 70 I was supposed to get, as the price of movie tickets was 150; the entrance fee for the local junior disco was 50. The raise was granted.
I remember my very first allowance. My mother called me into her room and dropped six quarters in in my hand:
Me: What’s this for?
Mom: That’s your allowance.
Me: What’s an allowance?
Mom: That’s what you get paid for taking the trash out.
After processing that for a while, I had the greatest idea ever. I went around my apartment complex offering to take people’s trash to the dumpster for 25 cents. I must of made $5 that day. (70’s)
Starting at 7 or 8 I got $2/wk allowance and it went up to 5 when I was 12. My mother was a bit sexist about chores though so for that money my brother hand to take the garbage to the curb once a week. For $2 I washed dishes, weeded the garden, picked vegetables for dinner and swept floors. For $5 we added laundry, ironing and cooking to the mix.
It wasn’t all bad though my parents paid for my competition fees and I got to keep any cash prizes. I also started babysitting when I was 12. I was the favorite in the neighborhood because I thought I was supposed to wash the dishes, sweep the floor etc etc while watching the kids.
Early '60s, I got 2/- but only if my father remembered, which wasn’t very often.
Starting when I was about 10, say 1947, I got a dime a week, the cost of a comic book. When I went to HS in 1950, it went up to $1, plus 22¢ (the cost of the standard cafeteria meal) every day my mother didn’t prepare my lunch. But I had to spend 75¢ a week for carfare, so I really got only a quarter. One friend of mine in HS got $10 a week; I was incredulous.
I never got an allowance as such. When I was little, my parents either bought things for me directly or gave me money on a case-by-case basis if I was going somewhere without them. I started working in the family business before I was 10, however, and got paid (semi-regularly) for that. Once I was getting paid, it was generally up to me to buy things I wanted (mostly books) out of that. Necessities and big purchases were still parental business for the most part.
When it comes to allowance systems, I did want to add a note about how it worked for one of my best friends. Starting sometime in elementary school, his parents gave him $1500 in January. This was his allowance for the entire year, and he was expected to buy all of his own clothes and shoes with it as well as any “extras” he wanted. If he blew it all on candy and movies in the first month, he was out of luck for the rest of the year.
As a teaching tool, this technique still seems like pure genius. Assuming, of course, that the parents have the backbone to stick with it. I would bet that my friend knew more about budgeting and money management by age 15 than most people learn by age 30.
Hard to remember, but it must have been about 35 cents when I was a little kid - I remember because it was enough to buy one or two comics, and one of those little fruit pies.
Later, it must have gone up to $1.25 because I remember buying a Hardy Boy book and my brother amazed that I would spend it all on a BOOK and not candy, like he did.
BTW, I just downloaded a Hardy Boy book on my Nook and started to read it - just wanted to see what I thought was super cool literature back then! I remember hoping Franklin Dixon would never die so I could read Hardy Boy books forever! (Little did I know that Mr. Dixon only wrote about one or two books, and the others were all farmed out to other writers…)
Re-reading this now, I am chuckling at the verbiage and slang and story…I guess it was super cool at the time, and am surprised I even understood some of the words that are rather archaic today.
I think it was about $5 a week in elementary school, then got as high as $10 by junior high. In high school I found ways to get my own income. For instance, my school didn’t have air conditioning in one of the major buildings, so I’d save up my money during the summer, buy portable, battery-powered fans, and rent them out to my classmates.
I think I would have started out with less than a quarter as a very young kid, but it was a lot at the candy store. I definitely remember a quarter, then 50 cents. In middle school it would have been enough for Burger King once a week when we got out of school half-day on Wednesdays when the public school kids came for CCD. The most I got was $5 a week as a high school student (graduated 1985). I remember my father making a production of giving us our last allowance amounts when we got summer jobs. Of course we only had to do the minimum chores (bring our laundry down- and upstairs, and make our beds) – our jobs were to be good students. Clothes and other stuff were paid for out of my birthday and gift money from grandparents.