When Jillian Minerva was customer service manager of Richmond Market & Beverage in 2010, she noticed something strange in the cash registers at the end of each night.
The recent Champlain College grad knew from working retail jobs that dimes are never the most used coin, yet her store churned through the 10-cent pieces. Minerva soon realized that her teenage coworkers were relying on dimes to make change.
“So if the change that they were supposed to give back was 83 cents, they were handing back eight dimes and three pennies, rather than understanding to start with the quarters,” said Minerva, 37.
Since then, Minerva has seen gaps in basic math skills among the dozens of young people she has employed at the Barnard General Store, which she has owned with her husband, Joe, since 2013. She’s helped her workers figure 10 percent discounts on seafood preorders and set up car insurance when they didn’t have coverage as drivers.
She concluded that Vermont kids need help learning financial fundamentals. So in June, Minerva launched a series of guidebooks she calls Aldo’s Allowance Academy.
Aldo is an owl that guides kids through lessons on everything from basic coin counting to understanding taxes. The lessons progress through three guidebooks divided by suggested age group: 6 to 8; 9 to 11; and 12 to 14. The books started as a project of the store, but in February Minerva set up a stand-alone website and social media accounts for her resource.
Vermont is not among the 35 states that currently require K-12 students to take a course in personal finance to graduate, according to 2024 data from the Council for Economic Education, a national nonprofit aiming to give students tools to make better financial decisions. (Kentucky has added the requirement starting with the class of 2029.) Some Vermont school districts, such as Winooski, still mandate their own financial literacy classes.
In Minerva’s view, good monetary skills depend not on what kids learn in school but also on how they apply those lessons at home. It’s like learning a language, she said — if it’s not used in the real world, it won’t stick.
She blames screens for the lack of dollar sense among today’s youths. “I think that everything is just so digital that these kids are never handling actual cash and coins anymore.”
The Aldo’s books include a variety of practical tasks, activities and companion guides to help parents develop plans best suited to their families. A key component is a weekly Money Meeting, where families can play games together and distribute allowances earned for chosen chores.
“It’s a system that’s supposed to create a rhythm throughout your household, where every day, or at least every week or something, you’re concentrating on teaching them some money skills and taking them out into the real world,” Minerva said.
The program has kids use ledgers to track their income and transactions. So on an allowance week, a parent might tell a child, “You’re going to come shopping with me, and if you want a certain snack, you have to see how much money you have in your bank account, and you can buy it yourself,” Minerva said.
The books cost $19 per level or $49 for the three-level bundle. Customers order online and download them, but the guides are designed to be printed out.
“These kids are so addicted to their cellphones, it’s insane,” Minerva said. “So I’m trying to promote more screen-free activities, for sure. The idea of having these weekly money meetings and getting together as a family — I think that’s really important.”
Aldo’s guides include nonmonetary lessons, too, such as how to address an envelope and prepare for a job interview. “It’s just really approachable,” said Sarah Prentiss, who started her 9-year-old daughter, Winter, on the Aldo’s program about a year ago. She was pleased that the activities were offline and on paper. Winter particularly likes dividing her allowance into jars labeled “save,” “spend” or “give,” her mom said.
“We do kind of the odd numbers, and so she has to tally it up and figure out how much she’s going to get for that week,” Prentiss said of Winter’s earnings, which vary based on the tasks she does at home in Woodbury. “We talk about the want versus the need.”
Minerva said the idea for the guides dates back to when she was 16, growing up on Long Island, N.Y., and got her first job at a chiropractor’s office. Her first paycheck was less than she expected; she told her father there must have been a mistake. He explained that taxes were deducted from her total wages.
Minerva decided she would create a way to prepare her future children to understand money matters when they got their allowance. Aldo’s Academy will be there for her two kids, 3-year-old Francesca and 1-year-old Cullen, when they’re old enough.
Minerva has sold about 170 of the guides so far to customers in 22 states, she said. She recently added a “Business Blueprint” package to help youngsters start their own enterprises.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Earning Learning | Aldo’s Allowance Academy helps families teach financial literacy”
This article appears in Kids VT Money Issue • 2026.
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