You may have noticed we added a Kids/Basic option to the dropdown menu when choosing advanced or simple mode. The idea is to come up with an easy way to teach kids about budgeting their money and get started at an early age. This is a very slimmed down version of the regular site to avoid having to think too much. If you have any recommendations to the site, please let us know. Below is a list of features/changes that were made to make it more Kid/Basic friendly.

  • Transactions – The first thing you’ll see is that there’s no New Transaction page. We felt it’s better to put it into a sentence instead and created 2 entries in the top dropdown titled “I Made Money” and “I Spent Money”.  They then need to just fill in the amount, payee, and category. The date will automatically be entered as the day the entry was created and lots of other features such as Gasoline, Tax Deductions, and the Account were removed. All entries will get entered into the Cash Account since most kids dont have a checking account yet. We will however look into being able to save money into a savings account that their parents setup for them.
  • Colors – At the top we added an easy way to change the color of the site and plan to offer some background pictures of cartoons possibly in a future release.
  • Chores – Parents should enjoy this one. This will allow the kids to keep track of what chores they need to get done. The parent will probably want to set this one up for them so they just need to click on the link to see what needs to be done. If you click on Chores Forecast, you mark it as done. If you have a subscription to budgettracker, you can set them up as a sub-account and then check their chores list from work to see what got done and what hasnt.
  • Pre-Defined Categories – When you get started creating the budget, you’ll see we offer a pre-defined list of categories to choose from. If you would like to add your own, you can either choose “Custom:” from the template dropdown or under the Action dropdown at the top, choose “Other” to see a list of all site links and select the “Categories” link. Below are the pre-defined categories to choose from:
    • Allowance
    • Lawn Mowing
    • Arcade
    • Candy
    • School Lunch
    • Toys/Games
The Kids/Basic pages are directly tied in with the original Budget page so if you would like to make more advanced changes to the Transactions or Budget items, you can always change over to Advanced or Simple mode to make the changes needed. We are currently looking into Budgeting for kids that are not quite old enough to have checking accounts or living on their own but old enough to have a real job.