GoHenry: Making Responsibility and Allowance Easy
Updated: May 17, 2022
The days of having to count dollars and keep track of your kid's chore money have now come to an end. GoHenry makes allowance and learning responsibility easy for both parents and kids.
What Exactly is GoHenry?
GoHenry is an app and debit card combo designed to help parents manage their kids' chores and allowance while enabling kids to learn responsibility and financial skills. It's completely free to join (30 days to test it out, then $3.99/month afterward) and has apps available for both parents and their kids.
It's simple to use, and now includes features such as videos, quizzes, and "missions" to help your child improve their financial literacy. These lessons and skills also develop and change as your child ages up, helping them to learn as they grow and be prepared by the time they reach full independence.
How Does It Work?
As a parent, you'll have a separate app compared to what your child will be using. This apps lets you manage their account, add money to your parent account (from which chore money/allowance/etc. will be deducted), and also be able to keep track of—as well as limit—what they spend their money on via their GoHenry card.
Once you sign up, you'll be sent a customized card with your child's name and whatever design they choose. Once this card has arrived, you can then set up your online/app accounts.
Using the parent account, you can set up a weekly allowance, make a list of chores with designated prices upon completion, and even set up a savings account for recurring weekly deductions to help your child work towards whatever goal they'd like to set and work towards.
GoHenry also offers secure links you can send to friends or family members for them to transfer gift money directly to your child's account on birthdays or holidays, and they also provide options for your child to give regular donations of any amount to a charity or program of their choice to encourage giving and development of empathy.
The app allows you to place restrictions on where they can use their cards (stores, ATMs, and online are the three available options) as well as place limits on weekly spending, the total amount they can spend at one time, and ATM withdrawal limits.
Every time your child uses their card, your phone will receive a notification, and the expenses (and even failed PIN attempts) will be logged on their account history. You will also have the option to block the card in general to prevent any purchases from taking place beforehand.
Additionally, the team at GoHenry has now also added the capability for a co-parent to be added onto the child's account as well for helping to add funds, keep track of chores, and assist and participate in their child's overall financial experience.
Our Experience
I'm not the type to carry cash very often nor keep up with which chores have been completed because it's just an endless cycle every day and every week. This combination makes it a bit difficult to really bother when it comes to allowance, but I was intrigued when I saw GoHenry advertise a couple of years ago, and I asked my kid if she'd like to try it so we could both benefit from the program—she'd be getting paid for being responsible, and I would be able to more easily keep track of just how responsible she was being.
She agreed and was excited to pick out her card design (a super cute Chocolate Lab puppy) and also have her name replacing "Henry" in the "GoHenry" logo at the top of the card. We've had the card for a while, so I can't remember specifics, but I don't recall it taking very long to come in—maybe just a couple of weeks at the max since they were custom-making the card as well as setting up her overall account.
Once it came in, I set up the parent app and was quickly and easily able to link my debit card for funding and then make a list of chores and their "prices" for her to complete. She struggles significantly with ADHD, so remembering to do things has always been a problem for her, but she was far more motivated to stay on top of her responsibilities and even check with me regularly about whether she had anything left to be completed so she could earn more money.
We later set up a savings account to take $1.50 from her weekly earnings each Friday and transfer it over to help her easily reach her $100 goal to be able to buy a remote control car she desperately wanted. She "feels like an adult" (her words) by having her own card and being able to spend her money however she pleases, whether that's on a new drawing notebook or some candy or a new plushie for her stuffed cat collection.
She currently does not have a cellphone, laptop, tablet, or any other electronic device to access the app's new features, but I will certainly update with feedback on those aspects as well once she's been able to test out the missions and learn a bit more about finances, managing money, and saving. Thankfully, the app does allow parents to take a sneak peek at those features to ensure we find them suitable for our kids.
New Features: Learning Apps
The newest features provided by GoHenry are their in-app "Money Missions" to help children learn more about money, working, saving, investing, and more! These include videos, quizzes, and badges your child can earn while going through the missions and increasing their financial literacy.
These are some of the Money Missions currently listed on the parent app preview:
Money basics
Jobs & earning
Saving habits
Spending wisely
Helping others
Money safety
Borrowing & credit
And more!
Each one of these mission topics has about 5-6 subtopics each with further information on that mission's main focal point.
Upon clicking on the first option's first actual mission and accessing the parent demo, the learning missions start out structured like a chat session with a robot and allow your child to select from a few different responses to each of the friendly robot's prompts. I'm given a couple of different text responses I can choose from, make my selection, and then get to watch a video explaining the mission's topic.
After watching the short informational video, the friendly robot is back in our "chat session" and checks to see if I've learned anything new on the topic. While testing this out, I simply chose "yes" and was then given a quiz via "texting" and could select the answers to submit them. The chat robot replied with fun, amusing gifs for the questions I got right, such as sending me a goofy-looking fellow dramatically turning around to give two thumbs up and a trio of dogs applauding my mad skills. When getting an answer wrong, you're simply prompted to "give it another try" with no penalties.
Once completed, you earn points and badges (not displayed on the parent demo) and can then proceed on to the other lessons.
Conclusion
GoHenry has a number of great benefits for helping children learn to work for their money, learn responsibility, learn about saving and giving, and begin to have a reasonable grasp on how finances work in the world. For parents, the accessibility, features, and convenience are ideal and make things just a little bit easier when it comes to managing kids and allowance.
Personally, I think the new in-app Money Missions are a fantastic feature for the GoHenry team to have added in, and I look forward to my oldest finally getting to test them out once possible. The best thing we can give our kids is knowledge and understanding before they get out there in the real world, and GoHenry helps makes this just a bit more easy and possible when it comes to all they'll need to know about finances one day.
Disclaimer: I am not an affiliate of GoHenry nor receiving any sort of financial or other compensation for the information and opinions provided in this article. These are simply my own personal opinions on the program along with the information provided on their website and within the app itself.
However, for those who are new to the program and would like to join and check things out, you can use my referral link to get $30 added to your parent account as well as receive 1 month entirely free!