The Young and The Restless | Adventures can help you cash in

Our weekend adventure centred around a trip over to Moama’s Return and Earn can recycling exchange to collect a bit of pocket money for the kids.

I knew the trip would cost me more in diesel, lunch and mini-golf at Rich River Golf Club than what we got from our 700-odd aluminium cans, but we were looking for something to do on a Sunday anyway.

I don’t routinely give my kids pocket money.

At the moment with interest rates, fuel prices and the general cost of living skyrocketing, it would be hard to find three times whatever the set amount was some weeks, so it’s probably lucky I hadn’t made a rod for my back before we arrived at this point in the current economic climate.

When I get tax returns or other unexpected spare cash, I share it with them; when we go on holidays I load their cards with their own spending money; when it’s their birthday or Christmas, I always include a little cash with their other material gifts.

So they’ve pretty much always got a bit of pocket money — they just don’t earn it on a regular basis from me.

There is rarely a week that goes by I don’t take my kids on an adventure or out to eat or for ice-cream, and I feel that is pocket money, in a sense.

You might suggest that’s not teaching them how to manage their own money or giving them their own freedom to choose what to spend it on, and I would agree.

I have tried the pocket money thing in the past, giving them set chores to do, which once the novelty has worn off, they become used to the income and bored with the chores, so they start slacking off.

I feel like I’m forever nagging them to do their jobs, waiting for them to do their jobs after they’ve finished what they’re doing and sometimes having to re-do tasks because someone did half a job of it in their haste to get back to something else.

I’m also of the firm belief that if four people live in a house, regardless of who owns the house, all four people should be contributing to help keep it running without financial reward. I mean, who wants to live in a pigsty? You’d think just having a clean, tidy and comfortable space would be incentive enough to chip in with cleaning, tidying and making it comfortable!

I find myself saying to the kids things like: “I pay for the food and I cook the food, so surely we can all unpack the groceries.”

Yeah yeah, I know they “didn’t choose to be born”, but I’m pretty sure they’re happy they were!

So, I find the pocket money for chores doesn’t really work for us from either angle.

These days when I ask them to give me gift ideas, the standard response is: “I dunno, I don’t really need anything.”

While that makes me proud they’re grateful for what they already have and clearly not greedy, it makes gift-buying tricky.

But it also tells me they don’t really need pocket money either.

Between them they have three paper rounds, and week after week their motivation for the task remains intact (something I never witnessed during house-chore-pocket-money trials!).

Working for an employer is different to working for your mum at home, I suppose; there’s a strict deadline to be kept (no bargaining to do it the next day like they do with me), and the favour is returned when they get paid the same amount at the same time every week (not Mum saying: “I’ll get it to you tomorrow, I haven’t been to the bank yet.”).

Every week I help with their paper rounds so they can earn pocket money in a safe space and not be out on the streets alone.

The pay isn’t much for the time and effort it takes, but I look at it as getting some non-negotiable routine exercise and helping the kids earn pocket money without it coming out of my own pay packet, both of which help me as well.

We look at it like another weekly adventure. Will we get rained on and have to run home giggling? Will we get wrapped up in orb spider webs and start shrieking? Will we get chased by psychopathic canines who’ve escaped their yards and get a shot of adrenaline? Will we be accosted by drunk people wanting a much closer look at my tattoos and get a dose of fear? (True story.)

So, the moral of my story this week is that not all adventures have to cost money; some make us money.

Why not keep your cans and rattle on over to Moama to cash them in, too?