Repayment Planner

Fill in what you know. The planner works out the weekly figure, how many payments it takes, what the last one comes to, and the date it finishes. It does the arithmetic so that the two of you do not have to do it in front of each other.

Why does it open with nothing in it?

Because there is no honest number to put there.

Nobody publishes an average for what a teenager can pay per week. Nobody publishes a standard share of a repair bill, a going rate for an hour of work at home, or a normal length for a repayment. We looked, and the figures circulating are unattributed numbers on sites that are selling something else.

A prefilled box is not neutral. Whatever sits in it becomes the number the reader argues away from, which means it functions as a recommendation whether or not it is labelled as one. On a site whose entire position is that it will tell you when something is unknown, inventing a starting figure for the most personal number on the page would be the exact failure the site exists to avoid. So it starts empty, it tells you which boxes are still empty, and it waits.

Why does it show the arithmetic rather than just the answer?

Because you may well have to defend the figure on a Saturday morning, and a number that arrived from nowhere is hard to defend.

The working is set out in the order you would say it out loud: the cost, the share, what the weekly figure is built from, the division, and the remainder that becomes the last payment. Most totals do not divide neatly, so the last payment is usually smaller than the others, and it is better to see that in advance than to discover it in week seven and improvise.

It also means you can check it. This is a small piece of arithmetic and you should not have to take a website’s word for it.

What should I do with the schedule once I have it?

Write it somewhere physical. The planner is a calculator, not a record, and it forgets everything the moment you close the page, which is deliberate.

An index card with the total, the weekly amount, every date in a column and a box beside each one does more work than any app, because the point is that the remaining total visibly falls and that both of you are looking at the same object. Print the page if it helps, or copy the dates across by hand. Then put it somewhere ordinary and slightly private, inside a cupboard door rather than on the fridge.

What does this not do?

It handles the money, and the money is the easy part.

It cannot tell you whether the share is fair, whether your teenager can really manage the weekly figure, or whether the arrangement is going to survive the third week. Those are the questions that decide the outcome, and none of them is arithmetic.

It also does not decide the thing that comes before all of it, which is whether making them pay is the right response at all. There are households and incidents where it is not. Should they pay for what they broke works through that question, including the case where there is no money and no way to get any, and the homeowners insurance question.

The mechanics that keep an agreed figure alive are the other half: making a repayment actually stick covers agreeing the number without starting the argument again, what a missed payment does, when to forgive part of it, and how to end it cleanly. One thing from that page is worth repeating here, because it is the part people leave out: decide what happens on a missed payment before the first payment, and say it out loud. A consequence that is known in advance is a different thing from one improvised afterwards in a bad mood. The nearest research point in our sources is a study of 312 undergraduates in which a pause before responding cut aggression when consequences were present and made things worse when they were absent. That is a laboratory task with college students and it is not about repayment, so hold it loosely.

Does it work with JavaScript off, and does it print?

The fields are ordinary inputs with real labels, so they can be filled in by keyboard, read by a screen reader, and printed as a blank worksheet to fill in with a pen. The arithmetic needs JavaScript, so with scripts blocked you get the form and no schedule, and the two buttons do not appear at all rather than sitting there doing nothing.

Printing keeps the working and the schedule and drops the buttons. Nothing is stored between visits, so if you come back tomorrow you will need the card, not this page.

One thing this page is not

It is not a debt collection tool, and it should not be used as a running account of what your teenager owes the household in general. A repayment has one cost attached to one event and one date on which it ends. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry describes the aim as helping a young person to “be responsible for his/her actions; and accept consequences”, and accepting a consequence requires the consequence to be finishable.

If the damage was to somebody else’s property, repayment may not be only a household decision. Parental responsibility for damage done by a minor is state statute, the statutes differ on who is liable and on whether there is a cap, and the survey linked in the sources sets it out state by state. Read your own state’s entry, and if real money is being demanded, ask a lawyer licensed there rather than a calculator.

If the wider problem is that no consequence seems to land any more, the money is unlikely to be the thing to fix first. That is when grounding has stopped working.