DoughMain: The Free Way to Organize Your Family, Teach Financial Responsibility, and Reward Your Kids!

DoughMain is an excellent free way to keep your family organized and teach financial responsibility too. The user-friendly tools designed by parents and teachers give you a practical, easy way to organize, teach, and reward your busy family. I personally know how busy life is with just one child, so imagine the benefits of using DoughMain when you have more than one child or a whole house full! Their site is super easy to navigate to learn more, but here are some awesome features of DoughMain that I think you'll enjoy!

ORGANIZE your family

Life is so fast-paced these days that it can be hard to keep every member of your family in the loop, on track and organized. With DoughMain's Family Organizer Tools, your family's activities are all in one easy spot to manage and organize for the entire family. Family Organizer Tools include a Family Calendar, a Chores Tracker, and an Allowance and Rewards tool. Learn more about each here:

Family Calendar
Chores Tracker
Allowance and Rewards

The Family Calendar in particular is an amazing way to organize any busy family. You can easily select just one or more family members and see all their activities, or just view the entire family. Activities are color-coded for each family member, making it easy to glance at your family's calendar and know who needs to be where on what date and what time. Easily stay connected with your family from any PC or from your smartphone with this awesome integrated calendar. You can even set up email notifications of events too. This tool is something I think every family should utilize and take advantage of, especially since technology is used for so many things in our lives anyway. Out with the old paper calendar, and in with the future of family management!

TEACH financial responsibility

Teaching your children basic financial principles and literacy just got easier with DoughMain's Money Games. Their three teacher-developed games feature age appropriate financial lessons, concepts and skills that are a fun way to learn and engage your children. I really liked each of the game sites and thought they were well-designed to keep your kids interested. The Fun Vault, geared for kids 5 and up, has 9 different games to get your younger children more money oriented. The "Exact Change" game combines coin value recognition with addition to quickly create the amount of change needed to gain points. I found it to be pretty fun and a great way to learn AND have fun! Here's an overview of the free game sites:

• TheFunVault.com, a Flash game portal teaching basic money lessons to children ages 5 and up
• SandDollarCity.com, a multi player virtual world where children ages 8 to 12 manage a family candy shop
• IRuleMoney.com, a site for ages 13 to 17, featuring 30-second videos of teens talking about all things financial, from jobs, credit cards, car loans, to credit scores

REWARD your kids

Getting children and teens to do things these days sometimes requires an element of fun (like the DoughMain's Money Games) or some kind of incentive. There's nothing wrong with that since kids generally learn best by actually "doing" and putting what they've learned into practice. With options through DoughMain to reward your kids through prepaid credit cards and retail gift cards, you allow your kids to learn about money basics and money management in a controlled way. I absolutely agree with DoughMain when they say that research has shown kids do not know enough about money and money management. It's a recipe for disaster when they reach adulthood, head to college, and choose to get a credit card. I know far too many peers who got into major financial trouble at that point in their lives. It can take only a short time to get into debt, but a long time to get out and learn the hard way about money. 

DoughMain has partnered with leading bank and financial service partners to offer parents a way to introduce financial concepts, like saving and spending, to your children at an early age. You can even connect your existing bank accounts to your family's DoughMain dashboard using Bank Link to monitor all your family member's bank accounts in one place, and to teach your kids about money with real bank accounts. Kids need real life experiences to connect the dots when they decide to buy that toy or candy bar, and this is a great way to do that. 

I know I'm not the only parent out that feels the stress of busy schedules, events and appointments. That's why I love the ease of the Family Calendar. When Buddy reaches the age where chores will be assigned and eventually allowance comes into play...WOW, it's going to be a lot to manage! But with DoughMain, it's actually an exciting adventure I'm going to be ready to tackle and manage when it's time. Lastly, as parents we should know how important financial literacy is, especially for our children. Lessons we teach our children now will have a lasting, and hopefully positive, impact on our children for the rest of their lives. Let's get organized, teach our kids financial responsibility, and reward them so they have the best chance at success in adulthood.

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Disclosure: I received monetary compensation in return for posting this information and learning about DoughMain through their website. Still, I only post information that is honest, and I feel will interest my readers. These are my completely honest opinions above based on my own experience and may be different from yours.