My daughter Michelle plays a lot of Roblox. For those that don’t know, Roblox is an online platform and game creation system where users can design, share, and play games created by others.

Roblox is a lot more fun with Robux, the in-game currency. You can buy all kinds of things with it (cars, hairstyles, pets, etc). If you commit to buying a certain amount of Robux monthly, you get a bonus:

A Robux subscription seemed like a pretty good way to control what Michelle spends on Roblox, so we signed her up for it. Previously she would ask me to buy Robux for her every few days and it caused some tension: don’t you think you’ve spent too much on Robux this month already? So now she gets a fixed Robux allowance 🙂

Of course she needs to pay for this out of her regular allowance. That was easy enough to set up in Bomad:

The nice thing about doing it this way is that she gets Bomad notifications every month about the $9.99 deduction. Without that, she might stop playing Roblox and forget to tell me to cancel the subscription. Even if she doesn’t see the notification, she’ll see the transaction on her account (and the negative balance this month!):

If you're already paying other subscriptions for your kids (PlayStation Network, Apple Arcade, etc), you could consider converting these to Bomad subscriptions: rather than just paying the subscription directly, give your child a Bomad allowance (you could even make it a specific “gaming allowance”) and then schedule deductions from that account:

Different strokes for different folks

Last year my son Andrew started using Brilliant at school. Brilliant is an online learning platform designed to develop problem-solving skills in various subjects. You need a subscription to use it and he wanted one.

Since it’s an educational app I was happy to pay for it. But I was also a little worried that he would stop using it without telling me and the subscription would keep running. 

I considered asking him to subscribe with his own debit card and then claim back the money in Bomad every month for me to approve, but that seemed a bit onerous. Perhaps he would feel that it was too much trouble and that he would rather do without Brilliant. Not the outcome I wanted to encourage.

So instead I just subscribed with my card and made a note to ask him in a few months if he was still using it. He was, but then I forgot about it. Eventually I checked again, and indeed he had stopped using it and I’d probably paid for 2 or 3 months unnecessarily:

So perhaps I should have gotten him to pay and then claim it back. I might have saved myself a few bucks 🙂