This is awesome — we do something simliar. I think the best program is one you can keep up with and WORKS. 🙂

Starting after my sister graduated and I took over all the “chores”, my mom began paying me $15 a week (super fair, even now because she pays her cleaning lady $40 every other week). I had 5 different chores to do in order to earn the money. There was no figuring on my mom’s part because the only time I was able to “choose” not do a chore is if I was sick…and then I had to make it up later in the week. There was no skipping, thus, no figuring. Granted, I was in 6th grade when this started and I’d been doing half the chores (my sister did the other half) for free until that point. So the expectation wasn’t new…the allowance given was.

Paid chores were: vacuuming and mopping the kitchen and dining room, cleaning the master bath, cleaning the guest bath, dusting and vacuuming.
Unpaid chores were: keeping my room clean (I wasn’t very good at this), helping with dinner, unloading the dishwasher, helping clean up after dinner, gathering the trash twice a week, bringing in the empty trash can twice a week, bringing in the mail daily, helping with grocery shopping, helping to bring in and put away the new groceries…and anything else my parents asked for help with.

Yes, I do put a lot of the work on the kids, to actually get the jobs signed-off — etc. BUT, it is up to me to calculate on Saturdays. I should get on that…. 🙂