Eh, we have a budget program in the house for learning skills, that are then used to help decision making when the kid has funds.

There isn’t an allowance. We buy the stuff based on circumstances. Cash isn’t as ideal as it used to be. Cards, be they gift, prepaid debit, or bank related, come with drawbacks that make them unattractive for the purpose of the kid being able to have their own funds.

They have a real budget and the educational one. The educational one is set up based on their efforts. Originally it was scaled, where it was a set amount every month, they’d have set prices for the basic items of life like rent and utilities but win those amounts representing a percentage rather than actual prices.

Then, as they mastered that, it to realistic numbers, taken straight from our actual bills, with their income factored by their school work and household responsibilities.

The only time the real budget, where they have an amount they can request be spent on their behalf that can roll over and be saved (up to a point, it puts a crimp in other things if it builds up too much) is if they decide to skip obligations, to go into debt, or otherwise do something that would screw their budget if it were real. When that happens, the real budget gets frozen until the educational one gets balanced again.

What they don’t know is that they have an account for when they get older that any of that amount that can’t be held in our accounts gets deposited to. Same when they make bad decisions in budgeting and it gets frozen.

It’s as close as we can get it to simulate adult life without being a horrible grind, or taking agency away, which leads to no learning by making mistakes.

They’ve gotten pretty good at making good decisions. And I mean by the standards of their situation. It isn’t all spent on stuff you might value as an adult. There’s music and crap food, and outings, whatever. But they make the decisions consciously, choosing to spend their budget on self care in those ways, which is a perfectly valid choice even for adults.

Not that that’s the only money that gets spent on such things. We’re fixed income, but they have a say in the tiny household entertainment budget, and have times when they plan the meals, etc. But that’s different from discretionary spending the way allowances were, and the way their personal budget is. Them picking a shitty movie to go to on the rare times we go out to movies, that’s not their allowance equivalent, that’s them taking their turn picking the movie. If they want a different trip out the next week, it would have to come from their discretionary budget instead of the household entertainment/fun budget.

It wouldn’t work for everyone. But it works for us.