The Greenlight App For Chores: Best App To Get Kids To Clean

I wanted to share something that we recently started implementing to help our kids keep up with the chores. Actually, everybody is pretty excited about it! It's called Greenlight, and it's basically a parent-regulated debit card for kids. But for us, it's more of a chores-regulated card for kids. Today, I'm going to show you exactly how we use the Greenlight app for chores.

It’s helped to encourage our kids to do their chores AND be financially savvy at the same time. So, if you want to find a way to implement a little positive reinforcement and ease when getting your kids to pull their weight, let’s dive in!

(FYI- I used zero referral links when I initially made this article/video. I was just sharing something that I used and liked. Now that I've been using the same app for a couple of years, I'm popping up my personal "refer a friend" link in case someone wants to give it a go! If you use it, we both get $30 after your first month 🙂)

Why We Started Using The Greenlight App Initially.

If you watch the video above, I’ll show you the behind-the-scenes of the parent version of this app. You can see how it all works together and synergistically encourages them to help out around the house, but I just wanted to tell you what brought us to this app in the first place. It wasn’t something that we were seeking out necessarily.

My youngest daughter is great at saving and has a lot of cash saved up from holidays, birthdays, etc. She’s not a big spender, but she plays online games and enjoys buying mods and upgrades to those games. Until this point, when she wanted to purchase something online, she would give us the cash, and we would buy it for her. She wanted to have something she could use on her own and get rid of some of the cash she was carrying around.

So, we were looking for a prepaid reloadable card, which was not as easy as I thought. Gift cards aren’t made to be reloadable. While searching for ANY reloadable prepaid cards, I came across this Greenlight card. Never heard of it before.

Clean House Meets Financially Savvy Kids.

I started reading into all of the functionality that is provided. It integrated chores, allowances, paydays, etc. You can set a one-time task that pays out automatically when the task is complete. They can create their own little savings accounts. (I show you how to do all this in the video above). There were just so many different functions.

Easier money-management

All of this is in addition to the fact that we could take lump sums of cash and put it on the card (our original intent). This would give my girls the freedom to make their own purchases with their own money and introduce us to a new method of financial savviness for our kids. Before, we were using Google spreadsheets to track allowances, which was a lot of work for me (being the one who maintained it).

Using the Greenlight app for chores

Not to mention, chore time could be a nag-fest and is something I’m constantly experimenting with. This seemed like it was just going to kill all of the birds with one stone. No more loose cash, no more spreadsheets, no more nagging, and no list-making.

It’s been a huge weight off my shoulders not to feel like I have to continuously be on top of it, reminding people, and making weekly lists of the things that need to be done when it’s the same stuff every week! This app has a loop function that repeats the same chores weekly on automation based on your chosen days.

So I’m excited about it, and the kids are super excited about it because they have their first-ever debit cards.

If they’re out with their friends and need cash because they’ve decided to go somewhere, I can send that cash across the app without driving to their friend’s house. It has so many different functions that work well.

How The Greenlight App Works.

There was a little finagling to get the chores set up just as we wanted. So, let’s go ahead and dive into how we’re using the Greenlight app for chores and financial learning.

As a parent, the first thing you see is the parent’s dashboard with a list of the kids you’ve all set up on the account for. You get to choose a background image for them, and you’ll see an at-a-glance overview of how much is in their spend, save, and give accounts.

Parent’s Wallet

The first option on the dashboard is your Parent’s Wallet, which is the holding area for funds you transfer from your bank account. This pool of money gets sent to your kids when you pay out for chores, allowance, etc. You can see that it’ll show the current balance up top, and then you can add money in amounts of $50, $75, or $100, or you can use the little green link (which I usually use) to enter a custom amount.

At the bottom, you can see what credit/debit card the funds are coming from. If you forget to add money and you go to transfer money over to your kids, you’ll have the option to automatically transfer enough to cover what you’re trying to send them. You can also set up auto funding at various frequencies: when the balance gets low, monthly, or when the wallet drops below a certain amount.

Click ‘Manage funding accounts’ to add or remove bank accounts. Matt and I have the app on our phones, and we can add our debit cards. At the bottom, you can see your funding history.

Kid’s money accounts

From the dashboard, tap on a kid account to see (at the top) a list of options: spend, save, give, and earn. We’re going to talk about the first 3 in this section. One of the cool things about the Greenlight app is that you can have multiple spending and savings accounts. You can turn the card on or off by tapping the card image in the top left corner.

Spend

The default opens to ‘Spend’. The top spending account, ‘Spend Anywhere’ (which I use now), allows them to spend wherever. The other options limit the spending to specific stores or categories like ATMs, Gas stations, etc. To add money to an account, tap on it and enter the amount you want to transfer. Use the green link on the following page to enter a specific amount.

Hint: this is how we pay them out for their chore earnings. There’s an additional option for what to do with the change. You can make it so that any change stays in the spending account, goes to their savings, or returns to your parent’s wallet. If you give them $20 to spend at the store and they only spend $15, then the remaining $5 goes wherever you established for it to go.

Save

You can also set up various savings accounts if you tap on save. This is also cool because the kids can save up for specific things. My teen is saving up for highlights and a water bottle she wanted from Starbucks. As a parent, if you want to encourage their savings, you can also pay an interest percentage of your choosing from your parent’s wallet.

If you tap on any one of the savings accounts, you’ll have an option to move money in or out. To move money in, tap that option, and it’ll ask how much and where from the ‘spend anywhere’ account, another savings account, or directly from your parent’s wallet.

There’s also a “round-up” setting so that the change (rounded up to the next dollar) goes into their savings when a purchase is made. The settings options are: ask before transferring, always round up, or never. If they go to the store and spend $15.50, the remaining 50 cents would automatically be put into the savings account (if this is turned on), resulting in more passive savings.

Give

The ‘give’ tab is similar to the ‘savings’ but is dedicated to a charity. If you choose to use this, you or your child can choose a category from the list provided or pick a charity on your own. Money can be transferred here from spending, savings, or the parent’s wallet.

How to use the Greenlight app for chores.

This is where things get cool- under the ‘Earn’ section. So, this is where you can start incorporating chores and tasks into this whole financial system.

Allowance

Right at the top, you can select to set an allowance. I don’t use this option because we like to get intricate with our chore lists and set a specific amount for each chore. This encourages them not to argue over who will do what and incentivizes them to do more of the little things that often get overlooked.

However, I can see where the allowance could benefit people. To use this function, tap the ‘Set an allowance’ button. You can set how much you want to send and how frequently. You can transfer it on a certain day of the week, biweekly, or monthly.

Then indicate where you want that money to go: ‘spend anywhere’ account, general savings, the giving account, or split by percentages. For example, 50% to ‘spend anywhere’, 40% to savings, 10% to give. You’ll be notified if your auto-funding is off on your parent account.

You can save this allowance to where it’ll automatically deliver whatever days you have set, or you can click the option below to ‘save allowance and add weekly chores.’ This attaches a chores stipulation to the allowance. You add the weekly chores, and as the kids do the chores, they check them off on their phone app.

If some things you put on the weekly chores list are not ticked off, then it will hold their allowance and notify you. 😲 Then, you can check in, wait until they complete the chores before paying out, or payout anyway.

Chores

We only use the chores section at the bottom in the Greenlight app, and we’ve had to get slightly scrappy with this. I wish some things functioned a little bit differently, but I will show you how it works. There are two options: weekly chores and one-time chores. These function very differently.

Weekly chores

Weekly chores repeat on whatever days that you set them for.

Go to options, and you can edit or add weekly chores and establish a schedule using checkboxes. Because we don’t care which day of the week various chores get done, we tend to keep everything checked (even if it’s something we only want to be done once a week). We can do this because we don’t have our chores attached to allowances. Instead, we manually payout for weekly chores into their ‘spend anywhere’ account.

Unlike the one-time chores (which I’ll show you in a second), no amount is tied to these weekly chores. Instead of being paid out individually, they’re intended to be used with the allowance function. But we wanted each chore to be worth a different amount! So, we added a dollar amount to the end of the names to manually add up the tasks checked off at the end of the week. This is what works best for us for the time being.

One-time chores

The one-time chores are cool because you can schedule an amount with them. Whenever it gets checked off, I get a notification asking if I want to pay it out. Then, it immediately transfers the amount to her account. I don’t have to do anything else. She taps it. I get a notification. I click a button. The money goes to her.

So, in this way, one-time chores are easier. They DON’T, however, cycle. This is why I use the weekly chores for the bulk and manually add things up every Friday unless it’s a one-time (or less than weekly) chore.

Ideally, in the future, if they could make the weekly chores available to have an actual amount associated, that would be ideal.

Still, this has helped free up a lot of time for me- the time from nagging or “reminding,” weekly repetition of the same chores, and time saved on clean up. Check out the video above for the full tutorial, and let me know what you think.