The give save spend jars for kids sitting on a shelf in our home started because of a moment I watched happen in the toy aisle in Target.

My son stood there holding a ten-dollar Lego set, doing math in his head. I could see it happening. I only have twenty dollars. If I get this, that’s half of it. He put it back. That was his decision, all by himself.

Nobody made him put it back. I didn’t even say a word. He just figured out on his own that money is a finite thing, and spending it here means not having it there.

That’s the whole reason we started the jars. We don’t do a chore chart, an allowance spreadsheet or any apps. We have three mason jars per kid, sitting where they can see them. Give. Save. Spend. The most low-tech money system imaginable 🤣 but it has done more to shape how my boys think about money than anything I could have explained to them.

This is how it works for us.

I want my kids to see their money. Not a number on a screen that updates magically. It’s rewarding to see actual dollars, in actual jars, that get heavier or lighter depending on their decisions.

When the spend jar is empty, it’s empty. It’s sad, but it’s true and we’ve all been there. My six-year-old can’t read a bank statement, but he can absolutely understand that the jar he wanted to pull from has nothing left in it.

For us, this part is simple: these might be Give Save Spend jars for kids, but the Give jar gets filled first.

When one of the boys gets money — five dollars, birthday money, something they earned from Mom and Dad, it doesn’t all land in spend, with maybe a little trickling toward give if there’s anything left. We do it the other way. Some goes in each jar, and give gets filled first, on purpose, before anything gets spent.

Yes, this means I have to have change around. I have a jar of $1s ready to split up their fives and tens when they get them. But, the good thing about this is that every so often, we’ll go through their jars and trade the ones for larger bills, once they have enough. So, it’s actually just me reusing the same ones over and over again. (I’d definitely recommend doing it this way so you don’t constantly have to keep getting small bills in change while you’re out)!

For our family, this is a God thing. We want our kids to grow up understanding that giving isn’t the leftovers, it’s the first fruit. It comes off the top. You set it aside before you ever start thinking about what you want.

If you take only one idea from this whole post, I’d want it to be that one. The order matters. Give first!

My boys started saving up for things. Real things, things that take weeks or even months of restraint. And they got good at it — good enough that they started pooling their money and saving toward different goals together. That cooperation wasn’t something I did. It just happened, because they could see they’d get to their goals faster as a team.

So eventually, we added an extra jar. A fourth one — the “We’re a Team” jar — that all three of them save into together. Right now they’re filling it for a trip to Universal Studios, and they have gotten so serious about it that they started a little seasonal business (more on that in a future post, but here’s the jist).

Natural fire starters! Packaged in sets of four, assembled at our kitchen table. We turned it into a real business lesson: they figured out the cost per set so we could land on a price that would actually leave them a profit, and they paid me back for the materials kit by kit as they sold them. They designed and printed their own labels. We sold them at a neighborhood yard sale, then to neighbors, and then a friend of mine who owns a small retail shop reached out and asked to put them on her shelves. They sold over fifty sets in December.

I did not see any of that coming. I set out to teach three kids about saving, and somewhere along the way they taught themselves about shared goals, patience, pricing, profit, and what it feels like to make something people actually want to buy. I do think that these jars helped lead them there.

The jars aren’t really about jars.

They’re a visual representation of something much larger we want our kids to carry into adulthood: you only ever have a certain amount, and you get to be thoughtful and deliberate about where it goes. Some is for spending, and there’s no guilt in that. Some is for saving — that’s where delayed gratification quietly gets practiced with intention, because the things worth having are usually worth waiting for. And goodness, that lesson isn’t taught enough in this digital age we’re living in. And some — maybe the most important part — is set aside for giving back to God, and it goes in first because all of it is a blessing from Him in the first place.

I thought I was teaching my kids about saving and giving. It turns out the jars were teaching them patience, teamwork, generosity, and the satisfaction of working toward something — and they were doing it on a shelf, in plain sight, while I wasn’t even looking.

Three jars. A few dollars. The give jar first. Give it a shot and let me know how it goes in your household.

Raising intentional kids happens in a hundred small, ordinary moments. For us, a lot of those happen outside. 

Grab the free Nature Scavenger Hunt Printable for Kids — print one card per kid, fill it out at the trailhead, and let them race to find everything on the list.

Want to go deeper on one outdoor topic? The Mini Explorer Packs on Etsy are themed activity sets, each one $5-6 and an instant download.

Planning a trip to the Smokies? The Great Smoky Mountains Family Travel Guide gives kids a real mission across five learning themes, with journal pages and a full week schedule built in. After over 100 nights spent camping in the park, this guide is what I wish I had at the start.