Home & Garden Home Contract With Your Kids to Save Energy By Shea Gunther Writer University of New Hampshire Rochester Institute of Technology University of Southern Maine Shea Gunther is a writer, entrepreneur, and podcaster living in Portland, Maine. He covers topics such as renewable energy, climate change, and nature. our editorial process Shea Gunther Updated February 12, 2020 Encourage your kids to turn off the lights with a little incentive. (Photo: R/DV/RS [CC BY 2.0]/Flickr) Share Twitter Pinterest Email Home Green Living Pest Control Natural Cleaning DIY Family Thrift & Minimalism Sustainable Eating My friends over at Energy Circle just launched a very cool new tool called Moolah Maker. If you have kids, you need to sign up. Moolah Maker allows parents and kids to create a contract to save energy. By entering in some historic data from your utility bill, you give the system a baseline from which to measure. Moolah Maker then calculates how much energy (and money) is saved every month and splits it out between parents and kids. It even creates invoices from the kids to the parents with the total due that month. It's genius. People change their habits when they see benefits, the more immediate the better. Kids are even more likely to change because they never have enough money and most don't have jobs. Moolah Maker gives kids a real and powerful incentive to cut down on wasted electricity and is an awesome way of getting them to think about larger environmental issues like wasted water. If you haven't perused Energy Circle before, you should take some time clicking around their store, great collection of energy articles and blog. It's one of the best places on the web to find out how to make your home more energy efficient and then get the stuff you'll need to do it.