About Teens and Money
Who writes this
Teens and Money is written and published by Jenna Hale, the pen name I write teen life-skills books under. I raised two boys through their teenage years, and both are in their 20s now with zero debt. Somewhere in the middle of that I also spent years involved in youth ministry, talking with teenagers about money along with everything else, well over a thousand conversations by the time I stopped counting. None of that makes me a financial expert. It means I have had this exact conversation more times than I can count, and I have a good sense of which questions actually come up.
I am not a financial adviser, an accountant, or a lawyer, and nothing here is personalised advice. What I do is read the primary sources carefully, write down what they actually say, and link to them so you can check.
Why the site exists
The searches parents make about teenagers and money are answered badly. Working through them one at a time turned up:
- A page ranking near the top for a teen tax question, quoting a threshold that stopped being correct in 2022.
- The single most-read page on opening a bank account for a minor: about 1,200 words, no named author, and three years out of date.
- Several of the most emotionally loaded questions parents ask, with page-one results made up of forum threads and one article from 2014.
- Allowance figures presented as national averages, every one of them produced by a company selling allowance apps, using its own subscribers as the sample.
That last one is the tell. There is a lot of confident writing in this niche and not much sourcing. So this site does the boring version: name the source, state the year, say plainly when nobody actually knows.
How it is funded
There is no paywall, no newsletter capture, no advertising, and nothing on this site is sponsored by a bank, a card issuer, or an app.
Some pages link to teen life-skills books that I wrote. I write the site, and I write the books. Same person, both times. I am telling you this on every page rather than burying it, because you should be able to weigh it.
The rule I hold myself to is on the editorial standards page and it is short: every page answers its own question completely. If a page ever leaves out the answer so you have to buy something to get it, the page is broken and I want to know.
Getting things wrong
I will. Rules change, and figures that were right in March are wrong in October. If you find something out of date or flatly incorrect, tell me and I will fix it and change the date at the top of the page. Corrections that change the substance of a page get noted on the page itself rather than quietly edited.
What this site is not
It is not tax, legal or investment advice, and it cannot be, because advice depends on facts about you that I do not have. Where a decision has real money or a legal consequence attached, the pages say so and point you at the agency or the professional who can answer for your situation.