About

Who builds this

SharkBucks is made by Peppertree, a small independent software studio. It is not a bank, it holds no money, it issues no card, and it earns nothing from what your family decides to do. Nobody involved is a licensed adviser or a child development professional, which is exactly why every page here states its reasoning instead of issuing instructions.

Where the numbers come from

The compounding is ordinary future-value arithmetic, applied weekly instead of monthly and credited in the order a parent actually pays: the allowance first, then interest on the jar including that deposit. It is unit-tested, and it matches what the app does, because a parent who sets a rate here will type the same rate into the app and the two figures had better agree.

Where they do not come from

There is no trustworthy figure for how much allowance a child of a given age should receive. Surveys exist, but they measure what parents in one country did in one year at one income level, and they get quoted for a decade afterwards as though they were a standard. This site will not do that.

So where a number would be invented, you get reasoning instead: what the amount has to be large enough to do, what it should not be large enough to do, and how to adjust once you see what your own child does with it. If you came looking for a table that tells you the correct figure, the honest answer is that nobody has one.

What these tools deliberately do not do

The calculator assumes nothing ever comes out of the jar, which is not how children behave. It assumes you keep paying at the same rate for the whole period. It models no spending, no missed weeks and no renegotiation, all three of which will happen.

It also uses a rate that no financial institution would offer, on purpose. You are not investing your child's money. You are paying for a demonstration of compounding at a speed a child can perceive, and that requires a rate that would be absurd anywhere else.

The app

SharkBucks is also an app, which keeps the actual ledger: what was earned, saved, spent and given away, settled on the day it is due. It is a record of money you hand over yourself. There is no card, no bank account and no money movement, and everything stays on the phone.

Contact

Corrections are welcome, particularly about the arithmetic: contact+sharkbucks@peppertree.so. The tools are on the home page.