TeenMoney is written by a 12-year-old and her dad. One of us is figuring this out right now. The other has been doing it for 25 years. You get both.
TeenMoney.org is a free library of money guides for people roughly aged 11 to 19, plus the parents helping them. No login, no paywall, no course to buy at the end. Every guide on this site is free to read, and it will stay that way.
We started it because the money advice teens can find online falls into two buckets, and neither one is useful. The first bucket is written for adults: it assumes a salary, a mortgage, a 401(k), and a credit score. The second bucket is written at teens, which usually means a cartoon piggy bank and the sentence "saving is important!" repeated six ways.
Neither one answers the questions teens actually have. What should I charge to babysit? Where did the money on my first paycheck go? Can I even open a bank account at 15? Is $200 enough to start investing? Those are specific, answerable questions, and they deserve specific, real answers.
It began with $100 and a spreadsheet nobody asked for.
When Elliana was 11, she saved her first $100 from babysitting. Then she wanted to know what to do with it, and started looking things up. Most of what she found was either too advanced to use or too vague to act on. So she asked her dad, Seth, and the two of them worked through it together at the kitchen table: what a custodial account is, why an index fund beats picking stocks, what compound interest actually does to $100 over ten years.
Those kitchen table conversations turned into notes. The notes turned into a first article. And it turned out other people wanted the same answers, so we kept writing.
That is still the whole model. Elliana writes for teens, because she is one, and she is not going to write "consider your risk tolerance" when the real question is whether to spend babysitting money on a concert ticket. Seth writes the parent side, because the questions parents ask are genuinely different ones: how much allowance, when to step in, how to open an account for a kid who cannot legally open one themselves.
We are not a media company and there is no team of ghostwriters behind this. It is two people who share a last name and disagree regularly about how much detail is too much detail.
Every article on this site has a name on it. Here are both of them.
Teen Money Writer · Saving, Earning, Investing
Twelve years old, started babysitting at 11, saved and invested her first $1,000 before she hit middle school. She writes every guide aimed at teens, which means she writes about the exact stage of money she is living in right now.
Read Elliana's guides →Parent Guides · Accounts, Allowance, Taxes
Elliana's dad, and the person who had to actually read the custodial account paperwork. He writes the parent-facing guides: allowance systems, first jobs, taxes on a teen's paycheck, and how to open the accounts teens cannot open alone.
Read Seth's guides →The process every article goes through before it goes live.
Every guide starts from something a teen or parent actually asked, not from a keyword tool. If we cannot picture the person asking it, we do not write it.
Pay rates, tax rules, and account minimums come from the IRS, the Department of Labor, state labor offices, and the banks and brokerages themselves. Not from another blog post that got it from another blog post.
"Charge a fair rate" is useless. "$15 to $20 an hour for one child in most suburbs, more after 10pm, more for infants" is a guide. If we cannot find a real number, we say we could not find one.
Jargon gets replaced or explained on the spot. If a sentence would make a 12-year-old stop reading, it is the sentence that is wrong, not the reader.
Elliana checks that it is understandable and honest about what being a teen is like. Seth checks that the financial and legal details are correct. Nothing publishes with only one of those.
Tax brackets change, contribution limits change, minimum wages change. When they do, we update the guide rather than leaving a wrong number sitting there collecting traffic.
A teen who invests $25 a month has an advantage an adult cannot buy back later. Time does most of the work, and teens have more of it than anyone. This is the single biggest reason this site exists.
Babysitting, mowing lawns, reselling, tutoring: these teach pricing, negotiation, and showing up on time. Those skills outlast the money. We would rather show you how to earn $500 than tell you how to save $5.
You are allowed to buy things you enjoy. Budgeting is not a punishment system, it is a way to make sure the fun money is actually there. Guides that make readers feel bad do not work, and we do not write them.
We are never going to tell you about a hot stock, a crypto coin, or a trading app that gamifies losing money. Broad index funds, held for a long time, are boring and they win. We will keep saying it.
Most of the accounts a teen needs require a parent to co-sign. That is why we write for both, in separate guides, so each side gets a straight answer instead of a lecture aimed at somebody else.
Five main areas, and about ninety guides sitting under them.
Side hustles that work at 12, 14, and 16, from babysitting and lawn care to reselling and digital art.
Explore →Budgeting that survives contact with real life, saving your first $1,000, and saving up for a car.
Explore →Compound interest, index funds, custodial accounts, and Roth IRAs explained without the jargon.
Explore →Building a resume with no experience, where teens actually get hired, and what taxes do to paycheck one.
Explore →Twenty step-by-step business guides, plus how to price your services so you are not working for free.
Explore →New guides twice a week, alternating between teen-facing and parent-facing topics.
Explore →We also publish a babysitting guide for all 50 states, because the rules on what age you can babysit, what you can charge, and what certifications matter are genuinely different in Vermont than they are in Texas.
It would be strange to run a money site and be cagey about our own, so here is the whole thing.
Here is the part that matters more than the list: nobody can pay us for a recommendation. We have turned down partnerships with products we would not hand to Elliana, and a company paying a higher commission does not move it up a page. If we recommend something, it is because we think it is the right pick, and if the best option pays us nothing, that is still the option we name.
Elliana writes the teen guides herself, and Seth edits them for accuracy before they publish. She is not writing the tax articles, and we do not pretend otherwise. Every article says who wrote it at the top.
No. Every guide is free and open, no account required. The newsletter is optional, and you can leave with one click. You do need to be 13 or older to join it.
Yes, and teachers do. Link to us or print what you need for your students. If you want something specific that we have not written yet, email us and tell us what would help.
The content, yes. That is exactly who it is written for. The one thing to know is that the newsletter is 13 and up, and the accounts we describe all require a parent to open them with you. Details are in our privacy policy.
Tell us and we will fix it. We would much rather be corrected than be wrong in public. Corrections go to the email below and we read all of them.
A real person reads every email. We are slow sometimes, but we answer.
If you are a teen who used something on this site and it worked, we especially want to hear about that one. It is the reason we keep writing.