employkids

Hey, I’m Jerry. I used to be an accountant, and now I build software.

A while back, I learned there’s no minimum age to open a Roth IRA. Kids can have one. The only requirement is earned income.

Here’s the part most people don’t realize: parents can legally hire and pay their kids for real work around the house. Cleaning, yard work, organizing, errands. As long as the work is age-appropriate and paid at a fair rate, it counts as earned income. The IRS explicitly allows this.

When you do the compound interest math, the head start is enormous. Starting at age 10 instead of age 30 can be the difference between retiring with roughly $400k and $1.4 million, with the same contributions over time.

The catch is documentation. The IRS expects employment agreements, work logs, and payment records. If you’re ever audited without proper paperwork, the contributions can be disallowed and penalties assessed. Most parents learn about this strategy, get excited, then see the requirements and quietly give up.

That’s a paperwork problem, so I built employkids to handle it. You hire your kids, log the work and payments, and everything is organized automatically. At tax time, you download a single, structured ZIP file with all the records.

If you run a business, there’s an added benefit. In certain cases, wages paid to your children can be deducted as a business expense and exempt from payroll taxes. employkids handles the documentation for household and business work separately, so everything stays clean and defensible.

I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you’ve looked into this strategy before. Happy to nerd out on the tax details too!