We've been giving Conor pocket money for almost 2 years. He gets $5 per week and he needs to save $1. Most weeks the money burns a hole in his pocket and he wants to spend it as quickly as he gets it. As he's getting older we're trying to get him to do a few more things around the house (nothing big, just helping with setting and clearing the table, putting his dirty clothes into his laundry basket, etc).
I bought a special ledger book to keep track of his pocket money. And we give him pocket money on Tuesdays as we don't have any sports or after school activities on that day. When he wants to buy something worth more than a week's worth of pocket money, he can usually save that himself. But if it's more than 2 week's worth he asks to go into credit. When we do this, I write it up in the ledger book so that we know when he's back in the black again. The only problem with him going into credit is that he wants to buy the next thing before he's paid for the first.
Right now Conor and Anthony are really into building model aeroplanes - Conor is getting quite the collection. There is a really good model shop in Philip. Mostly they get the 1:72 size which is recommended for beginners. Last time they were at the shop, Anthony asked about lay-bys. And they do them! So Conor had a model on lay-by and we went and paid it off last week. He now has another one on which will take a few weeks to pay off. This works much better for him than credit with us, because he's beginning to understand the importance of savings. In this picture he is about to pay off his very first lay-by
