I’ve also been excited for a while to put some allowance apps through their paces, but my 11-year-old is still attached to her Save, Spend and Give jars and the cash and coins that fill them up.

You’ve given savvy advice on buying cars, pouncing on credit card offers, and optimizing retirement savings. What’s your advice for the smartest way to buy tech products?

I have a saying — more like a lament — that I repeat so often that I’ve turned it into a hashtag: Nothing is simple or easy. (Nothing!) #Nisoe. Technology has come a long way, but it is almost never as simple as its marketers suggest. My wife and I have rarely managed to touch any aspect of our audiovisual setup in our apartment without needing to pay someone to actually make it work. Now, hiring tech support in this way is reflexive — a pre-emptive way to buy back time that would surely be lost in figuring the whole thing out and probably failing. So I encourage people to budget for that, whether in hours or dollars.

Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with using in your daily life, and what do you and your family do with it?

The infinite Spotify jukebox still seems like a miracle to me, and I’ve found it to be a particularly fun way to introduce my toddler to music. When she was smaller and knew no words, I’d improvise playlists over, say, breakfast-food-related themes: (“Toast and Jelly,” “Starfish and Coffee,” “Breakfast in America”) and then post them on Facebook with a photo to amuse friends and relatives.

Now that she’s putting words together, we riff off those. She just said “amazing” for the first time, so we tuned into Aerosmith and Luther Vandross singing songs with that word in the title. Also Barack Obama on YouTube singing “Amazing Grace.”