Ballard Bucks

My wife and I decided this past week to make a household currency system for our kids. The newly minted "Ballard Bucks" could be earned by doing chores, reading, and making age-related accomplishments (like successful potty training), and could be spent on screen time and desserts, or cashed in for real money, or taken away as payment for us doing their jobs for them.

So far, it's a huge success! We have yet to make a list of all the things Ballard Bucks are useful for, but the kids are so far really motivated by them, and though we've had to make a shared Note on our iPhones to keep track of how many Bucks each kid has just in case they try to steal the actual bills, things have gone smoothly otherwise.

Anyway, I wanted to showcase the Ballard Bucks I designed. It was fun looking at existing world currency and taking bits from some of them. I never realized before how it must be to actually design currency. You want to create something unique, recognizeable, and complex enough to be hard to counterfeit. It should show notable symbols of the country minting the currency, as well as identifying numbers and signatures to prove its authenticity. Below is the first batch of minted Ballard Bucks. I added symbology of the Ballard family crest (the gryphon), my religion, myself, and some cool designs. In retrospect, even though I would be printing these out in black and white for cost's sake, I should have made it in color just for the sake of presentation on the computer. That would've been pretty cool.